Objectivism & the illusion of currency?
cryptocurrency is literally NOTHING, a promise based on the integrity of a mathematical algorithm.
By definition Crypto means"
noun, plural cryp·tos.
a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief.
adjective
secret or hidden; not publicly admitted:
Objectivism is the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one's mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has.
Peikoff, Leonard (1991). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
A=A
Value for Value
So how is it a philosophy based on the tangible and observable can embrace such a vacuous idea for currency? Money being the physical representation of a persons labor, his/her sole property to do with what he or she wish's for his/her sole benefit. How does one give his "value" away for nothing or at best potential from nothing?
Granted the dollar isn't worth much if anything these days. Even so, if worse comes to worst you can wipe your ass with a dollar bill, you can smelt and reshape coins for whatever purpose you have. You can compost paper money to help grow food? Knock $10 worth of smelted quarters into some weak nails or a spoon?
What do can you do with cryptocurrency when it is 'considered' pass'e by the masses? When governments feel too threatened by another competing illusion of wealth (value) and filters out all the supporting protocols for the "currency" 1's & 0's from routers and servers around the globe of those "artists" they don't prefer (or who care not to share)?
What happens when you alone no longer are permitted access to your digital funds or your fund's algorithm gets rendered obsolete by the next version of super computer and your $10k cypto stockpile is worth absolutely nothing?
I get being frustrated with things are they are.But a recent conversation has me wondering if the whole **cking world has gone insane.
By definition Crypto means"
noun, plural cryp·tos.
a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief.
adjective
secret or hidden; not publicly admitted:
Objectivism is the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one's mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has.
Peikoff, Leonard (1991). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
A=A
Value for Value
So how is it a philosophy based on the tangible and observable can embrace such a vacuous idea for currency? Money being the physical representation of a persons labor, his/her sole property to do with what he or she wish's for his/her sole benefit. How does one give his "value" away for nothing or at best potential from nothing?
Granted the dollar isn't worth much if anything these days. Even so, if worse comes to worst you can wipe your ass with a dollar bill, you can smelt and reshape coins for whatever purpose you have. You can compost paper money to help grow food? Knock $10 worth of smelted quarters into some weak nails or a spoon?
What do can you do with cryptocurrency when it is 'considered' pass'e by the masses? When governments feel too threatened by another competing illusion of wealth (value) and filters out all the supporting protocols for the "currency" 1's & 0's from routers and servers around the globe of those "artists" they don't prefer (or who care not to share)?
What happens when you alone no longer are permitted access to your digital funds or your fund's algorithm gets rendered obsolete by the next version of super computer and your $10k cypto stockpile is worth absolutely nothing?
I get being frustrated with things are they are.But a recent conversation has me wondering if the whole **cking world has gone insane.
When you accept $100 from someone for something you created, you have an internal notion of what it took you to make it. When you go to exchange this abstraction for an item that someone else has made, you do a calculation of whether your underlying effort is a reasonable trade for the new thing.
In the case of dollars there is a relatively long history of the shared perception of its value. Cryptocurrencies, not so much. People may continue to value them or they might go the way of the tulips. Time will tell.
*some currencies are supposedly backed by things like gold or other precious metals. But even that is based on a shared perception of its value. Because, apart from its subjective beauty and resistance to corrosion, it's not terribly useful.
Ditto for copper coins.
A pre-1982 penny consists of 95% copper and 5% zinc. 4 It contains about 2.95 grams of copper, and there are 453.59 grams in a pound. Today copper spot price is $4.69/lb.
A pre-1982 'penny' is worth about 3 cents for its copper. Bankers would probably make the new copper coin with that content a half dollar.
An ounce of copper has spot price of about 29 cents. That would probably be the cartel's new 5 dollar eagle.
They make 1/10oz gold coins, worth $180 USD. I have not seen them, but I don't see why they couldn't make 1/10oz silver coins, worth $2.30. For smaller denominations, they could use 1oz copper.
Whatever is used, it needs to be resistant to counterfeiting.
We're asking too much of crypto or anything if we expect it to be impervious to theft.
I think many fans of crypto also ask too much of it. They say they want it to be a medium of exchange and a long-term store of value. I think it's great for a medium of exchange, but a long-term store of value is tricky. Value is providing for people's desires, e.g. a business the provides food, apartments, clothes, etc. It seems like crypto zealots want crypto to store value better than actually owning businesses that create value. That's asking a lot of crypto. Real value always comes from people serving one another in mutually agreed trades. Money is a way to do that without barter. If you want to store value, and deploy it to create more value, you have to actually own means of production, not just own a fancy medium of exchange.
Agreed on the computer part. I was working on what we have and are improving on, but it yet to come will make short work out of these algorithms, and millions will lose billions, perhaps trillions of actual money.
BTW, I'm all for riding the wave investment-wise, provided you know when to jump ship before it crashes.
its one thing to use the web to watch your funds, the actual money you put somewhere, and another thing entire to call a thing with absolutely no substance money.
Someone write a match algorithm which they claim cannot be violated, corrupted, hacked and then sell shares, for actual money, based on that confidence to millions people.
Lather-rise-repeat a thousand times and we have a global cybercurrency alternative financial system. This will end up making Bernie Madoff and the $65 billion he swindled look like a rookie. The most amusing aspect is who goes to jail when the bottom falls out? No one. A super computer can't be charged. It's almost funny.
It's the ultimate con-game.
Load more comments...