Why not buy one of the Greek islands. I hear they're in need of hard cash.
The island will be taken by the EU then. As collateral. |
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yup, then fear and panic caused the infamous bank runs and chaos (probably instigated).
Then the solution was presented, tadaaa: A central bank. The FED/EZB. It was meant to "regulate" the banks and the amount of money supply by being able to determine an authoritative key interest rate.
Today we know centralization is bad. It makes everything even worse. We have to go back and think of different solutions.
Guess a better solution would be some kind reinsurance system for banks against bank runs. Or they must take loans themselves from other banks in order to pay bank runners out. But what if there is a run on every bank? In my naive world view, every bank runner will be satisfied because most money is in circulation *somewhere*, it should be a zero sum game. Businesses that took loans use that money to pay their employees etc. There was never a need for creating money out of thin air by stretching balances.
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'cause you cleaned up your workplace?
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I was referring to lonelyminer's statement about "The various names for money", i.e. merely the etymology.
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that one was working  |
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@psy Can't add you, it says your certificate is corrupted (this occurs often when line breaks are wrong, but it's not the cause in this case).
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to be nitpicky, Dollar comes from Thaler comes from the name of a location, Joachimsthal in Bohemia. |
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then why are we discussing  this thread is about local currencies and bitcoin after all  but ok, lots of parameters to fine-tune there. *How* local? Which rules? I'd like to see an empirical approach one day, i.e. many communities trying out different things, all sharing their findings through the internet. (oh ok, and you said local commodity money, but a commodity for me is inherently universal) |
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If the price is allowed to float
yes, but does the price of the one universal commodity currency currently float in a way that is beneficial to the requirements of a local community at a given time and place? For one thing, it seems to be saying that people will be forced to not charge interest. That is just plain wrong. Why should anyone get to tell me how to use my hard earned money? Who made you the economic dictator?
No dictatorship required. Theoretically there can be interest of course (and it's implemented in some Ripple systems afaik), but in practice it shows that local-/trust-based exchange system encourage people to not use interest very much, don't forget also because these units of exchange are abundant. |
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yay for polimonetarism.
Ripple really really has to become totally ubiquitous in order to benefit from the 6th degree of separation effect so that it can "scale up" properly. And even then, as a developer I'd say Ripple is O(log n) for trusted transactions, while Bitcoin is O(1).
Yes it surely depends on a lot of factors in how far efficiency would be sacrificed for diversity, especially in today's world where we're all connected and can exchange information fast, but there definitely is a statistical tendency. The more production facilities you have for a car, the more likely there'll be reinvented wheels, but the more diverse cars can be produced.
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both have in common that it undermines decentralization either way  |
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We're all using a very local currency every day. That is our own precious time, our own work hours. Whether we buy groceries, do some boring paper work, or some mundane task in our job that is well below our qualifications but must get done so it's out of the way, all these things are *inefficient* because there'd surely be businesses we could find to outsource those tasks, who are specialized and thus more efficient at it.
So why don't we outsource everything? Because it makes us dependent. It makes us slow to react to changes. It makes us inflexible. And changes will occur. So this approach is unsustainable in the long-term. This is the *resilience* factor.
An actual local currency is an extension of this concept to a community. So often in history there were factories standing still while there were still skilled workers and there was still demand, but there was recession, there was "no money". So they could and should have established a local economic cycle with their own money before everyone starves of poverty.
With a money that is scarce, no matter if naturally or artificially, such things will always happen. I don't see how Bitcoin will mitigate that. Even the American colonies resorted to scribs at some point when gold became too scarce. But the scarcity of a currency is necessary in order to be ubiquitous and universally accepted, while in local context it has to be abundant in order to encourage activity. These are diametrical requirements that a dual currency system (i.e. gold with scribs, or bitcoin with ripple) can solve.
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Gibt's dafür eine Quelle? eher unwahrscheinlich antares
Sr. Member
SolidCoin Stats! deswegen |
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yup, for all you gold bugs and other commodity-bugs out there, what is money, in short?
Money is information.
That's all it is really.
Its purpose is to serve our bartering and trading with as least friction as possible.
All those different means and tools we have used as money in history and today have different characteristics which serve its original purpose in different ways, some better than others.
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