I’ll cue this video for the moment Paul says that he doesn’t need context in order to know the implied definition of a word. The significance or summary is that Paul is claiming that words don’t need context in defense of my accusation that he is misinterpreting a passage wrong.
I’m not sure we discussed the exact passage he was speaking to but I’m sure he would agree it was effectively this that is on the wiki for Ideal Money:
….money intrinsically not subject to inflation… ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_money
When we interpret that passage with inflation meaning “stable purchasing power” we can understand that bitcoin would not be a fit for Nash's Ideal Money because it is expected to deflationary (its purchasing power increases) and it has no direct stabilizing mechanism.
But if we understand the nuance to the word inflation we can put the passage into proper context:
I suggested the use of an “ICPI” index for the definition of the proper value for an “ideal” money. Here ICPI stood for “Industrial Consumption Price Index” (which would be a sort of index which could naturally be calculated from world market prices).
…
My position is that the appropriate “target rate” for measured inflation is zero.
Measured inflation but the metric or definition of inflation is with respect to the prices considered. If we consider a BPI (bitcoin price index), or the exchange price with bitcoin…then 0% inflation would mean a stable exchange price NOT stable purchasing power as Paul assumed was implied/implicit.
Put another way if an existing state currency was pegged to bitcoin, and made the exchange price stable…we would have a state money that is expected to increase in purchasing power over time but we would still call it zero inflation because the measure of inflation is redefined as a comparison to the price of bitcoin.
This is what Paul pulled out of context and didn’t understand. Thus he doesn’t really present an argument against bitcoin being used in place of Nash’s conceptual ICPI.
