Wants will increase with production capacity so that there will always be wants that exceed the production capacity. This is possible, but not certain. The production capacity can very much exceed human needs and desire. |
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The same air which I am currently breathing cannot at the same time be used by you. Should we attempt to do so, we would both die. Because I didn't read this part sorry. Let me ask you, just to make things clear: do you seriously think that air is a scarce resource?? If air is scarce, I very much wonder what is not. But you're neglecting the wood. That wood could have been made into the house/toothpicks/etc. Time is important, but not nearly as important as the opportunity cost incurred when you build a boat out of a tree that could have been made into a house.
I did not need/want this wood for anything but to build this boat. So it really does not cost me to use it. Really this argument you're making is weird. I don't get it. Yes, the cost per unit of power will trend down the more power you get out of a solar cell. But you are neglecting several costs which are very important. Primarily, maintenance. Solar radiation damages plastics, and even if everything you make is UV-proof, you'll still need to make sure the panels stay clean and aimed at the sun. Cheap, yes. Free, no.
Let me remind you that current technology is not "post-scarcity". From a theoretical point of view, there is nothing preventing a solar cell to repair itself, or to be repaired by autonomous robots. Basically just as organic life has been doing for three billion years. Post-scarcity economy will happen when inorganic, man-made artifacts will be able to extract energy and seemingly maintain a low entropy has life does. It's not for no reason that many people mention the self-replicating device as a key point when talking about post-scarcity. Because it is not mathematically feasible. Look at it like an electrical circuit: I (current) = V (voltage)/ R (resistance). In order for I to be 0, R must be infinite, or V must be 0. Price is determined much the same way. In order for the price to be zero, cost must be 0, or production infinite. Since neither of those are possible, price may approach zero, but it will never actually get there. Cost can be zero, imho. This clearly is our main disagreement. |
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That's not just air you are talking about. It's compressed air which underlies fundamentally different economic principles.
I was just talking about air. As was I. Not really, you were not. Compressed air is not just air. Same as diamond is not just carbon. |
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"price" is defined as the number of some market element (typically money) which must be exchanged in order to get the item in return. Perhaps you are equating "unpriced" with "undefined" (the mathematic term), but in the sense we are speaking of, "unpriced" and "0 price" are the same.
Yeah except that when something is "0 price", I, like many people on this planet, say it is free. Not unpriced. I don't know this notion well, but from what I see, it seems far fetched. Sure, it costs me some time (during which I could have done stuff), but just as much time as if I had stayed sited doing nothing. To me if something costs the same thing as if nothing happened, it pretty much means it costed nothing. If your robot did it, it also cost you the energy it took to run your robot, and the robot itself cost a considerable amount of energy to make. Again, you make the mistake of seeing only the price tag, and ignoring the greater truth: that nothing, even if given away without price, is not free. Everything has a cost.
Energy itself can be free. It comes from the sun and the sun doesn't ask me any payment. Sure, I need an energy conversion device to convert the solar radiation into usable energy, so you're going to tell me that this energy has a cost. It's just not true. The cost of the production unit is fixed, but the amount of energy it can produce it proportional with time. And a production unit can make other production unit. What's the cost of a production unit if it has been created by an other production unit? Tell me exactly how you calculate that. I think you can't, or that if you try, you'll come to realize that it will tend to zero. So to me, energy can perfectly be free. price ≠ cost. The recognition that everything has a cost is what creates the price system in the first place.
Cost is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a price. Things can be very expensive to build and yet nobody will want to buy them (because the people who build them were just wrong about what the market wanted). And things can be dirt cheap to build and yet very expensive (because they are rare, purely artistic/intellectual product, I'm sure there are plenty of examples). But time is limited. In just a few billion years, that sun will destroy this planet, and anything still living on it. So while growth is not inevitable, it's still a good idea.
If a concept is true but « only » during a few billion years, it doesn't mean it is false. If you want, yes, you can say that a post-scarcity economy can not last during more than a few hundred million years. I think the core problem we're having is you're still using the "shortage" definition of scarcity. You cannot get past the physical limits of scarcity, but you can certainly achieve abundance and therefore extremely low prices.
Yes, and I don't see why those "extremely low" prices could not actually reach the zero limit. |
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Oh right, my bad.
Keep in mind: You are arguing with libertarians who believe everything should be charged for. It's their religion, they think money to be the ultimate messiahs.
Might as well argue with a cow about toilets.
LoL I am very close to libertarian ideas myself, you know. Actually, I usually agree with most of what Myrkul write iirc. But not on this, apparently. And anyway, I still think the Zeitgest movement or Venus project stink, since they seem to be willing to use politics in order to realize an hypothetical transition to a resource based post-scarcity economy. This is wrong, as if this must happen, it has to be via technological progress and free market. |
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You guys are arguing in circles.
Is air scarce? There is only a limited amount of it but still there is enough air available for everybody.
Yes, that's what I meant when I mentioned air. Honestly I don't know what this obsession about infinite amounts is about. |
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In order for something to be completely free, it must be without cost. You are using "free" to mean "unpriced," I am using it to mean "without cost." I'm sorry but what I meant with free is not "unpriced". There is a price. It's zero. In order for something to be "without cost," the production of that good must: a) be infinite and b) not reduce the ability to produce another good. That is what is meant by "scarcity" in the economic sense.
If by cost you mean "what you need to provide to produce something", then yes, there is always a cost. You need time and you need energy for instance. But to me it is not incompatible with the idea of something being "free", as in, again, you don't have to pay anyone to have it. To me if I can build a boat by myself, using wood I found in a forest, this boat is "free". I did not pay anyone to use this wood and I used my own work. And if one of my robots does it for me it's even clearer since I didn't even work, I just ordered him to do it. Is it possible for production and transportation to be so cheap and abundant so as to be "unpriced"? Possibly. It is priced. If you want something that you can not produce yourself (because you don't have any robot, in which case you'll probably ask for a robot), you might find someone (at least one person), that will give it to you without asking any payment (because he will just order one of his robots to make it). By definition, it will mean that the price will be zero since at least one transaction can occur at zero. We'd probably need to be a Kardashev Type III civilization, though, harnessing vast amounts of energy. It very much depends on the size of the human population in coming centuries. The power of the sun can totally be enough, as we don't have to spread through the galaxy. Growth is not inevitable. But no matter how advanced we get, we will never escape scarcity (see above definition). Since that is a physical law of the universe, I don't see money disappearing any time soon, no matter how cheap things get, simply because it makes it easier to wrangle the necessarily finite production and transportation capability of the universe. Post-scarcity economy does not pretend to violate mass-energy conservation and things like that. The fact that production capacity has to be finite does absolutely not mean that it can not overwhelm human needs and desires. |
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Oh. Why didn't you tell me we were discussing a completely different universe than the one we live in now?
Yes, in a completely different universe, where transportation and production are free, scarcity might be eliminated. But that's not the universe we live in. We live in a universe bound by physical laws which preclude the possibility of free, infinite production and transportation.
You keep talking about infinite production. I wonder why. Free doesn't mean infinite. It means you don't have to pay anyone for it. You own machines that produce or transport anything you need. And you use the energy of the sun. Assuming the energy of the sun and the total available amount of matter (which can at least theoretically be produced from the energy of the sun anyway) are much enough to produce and power the machines used by the human population, it is very much possible that both energy and transportation are free. |
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No. Shortages happen when the total amount of what is available is insufficient to satisfy demand. Scarcity is the realization that production is not infinite
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scarce«Uncommon, rare; difficult to find; insufficient to meet a demand.» transportation is not instantaneous or free, and choices need to be made on what to produce and when to produce it, and where and when to move it. That is the function of the price signal.
Prices exist only where there is a market. And there is a market only where transportation is not too big a problem. EDIT: I let myself guided in a wrong direction. This is not the issue. We are in the hypothesis where transportation and production are free. But yes, at least from some local point of view there will always be areas where there will still be scarcity. At least because the speed of light is finite. We talked about it above in this thread. If you travel through interstellar space, you can only use what's in your spaceship and the bigger it is, the more energy you need to move it. So there is little chance that you can avoid scarcity for this. I don't think that denies all pertinence to the post-scarcity economy concept, though. If a group of people travel to the desert, the most valuable thing for them is water. That doesn't say much about the value of water for the rest of the world. Traveling through a desert or through interstellar space are very particular human activities. |
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Absence of scarcity does not mean infinite amount. There is no scarcity in sand nor air, and yet the total amount of these things is finite: huge, but finite. And yet we pay quite a bit for both sand and air, because they are not available everywhere we need them. We lack the means to transport air and sand where we need it. Indeed some people might need air in spaceships for instance, and yet this will not make me tell that there is a lack of air on earth! I repeat my point: Scarcity happens when the total amount of what's available is not enough to satisfy demand. Post-scarcity economy will happen if at some point in the future production capacity far exceeds population growth. Which is totally possible. There is no need to talk about infinity anywhere in this debate. It's about what's needed or desired and what is available or can be produced. |
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Absence of scarcity does not mean infinite amount. There is no scarcity in sand nor air, and yet the total amount of these things is finite: huge, but finite. Scarcity happens when the total amount of what's available is not enough to satisfy demand. Post-scarcity economy will happen if at some point in the future production capacity far exceeds population growth. Which is totally possible. |
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You can never have such a technology because norms change with technology. Things you could only dream of 100 years ago are now almost free for everyone, yet we are still going through almost the same levels of hectic struggle throughout our lives. This has natural reasons. There is nothing that prevents the existence of beings that do not seek higher power, but they are naturally overcome and obsoleted by those that do. When we have a cure for cancer, we'll focus on the cure for getting old. When we can visit the stars, we'll seek to reach the galaxies. Pain and suffering is a part of this very mechanism, it's not independent. If you aren't craving for more, pain (and lack of it) loses meaning. Life, including being human, loses purpose. If you weren't craving for more, why did you even go through all the struggle to be able to walk and talk?
Talking about post-scarcity economy does not mean you have no more desires. In a post-scarcity economy, you can still have the will to have more stuff. But in order to acquire those stuff, you don't have to compete with other people. You can make those stuff yourself (i.e. with your machines) without bothering anyone. You don't have to share or buy anything. |
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Scarcity will never go away. Technology reduces it's impact, but no technology will ever produce a complete lack of scarcity. Free is not possible. Cheap is.
Scarcity can go away if you let your imagination go wild. There is no physical principle preventing a post-scarcity economy from happening. |
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Kaku talking about post-scarcity economy on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzgVWpa4fzUYeah sure, in a world where we can create anything by pressing a button, we won't need money and we won't need to work. And yes, that'd be great. But that has nothing to do with a social or political project. It's purely technological. Until we have such technology, we still need money to deal with scarcity. When two people want a same thing, the one who will get it must be the one who is willing to do an effort to get it, to work for it, to give something in exchange. In a nutshell: to pay the price. Saying that we should give up on money now because we might reach a post-scarcity in the future is just silly. |
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À propos, je croyais qu'Armory était un client lourd, dépendant de bitciond en faite. Ils l'ont évolué pour le rendre aussi un client légère client-server?
Non, je me suis trompé. Désolé. |
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Je crois qu'on a loupé ce court reportage sur bitcoin le mois dernier sur Arte. http://videos.arte.tv/fr/videos/bitcoin-monnaie-d-echange-alternative--6988468.htmlJ'ai créé un torrent pour l'occasion: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a28c1b3429cee2bc52b3f5a34138b3e7828f80a1&tr=udp://tracker.istole.it:80/announce Erreur relevée: 1:31 « les transactions en bitcoin sont cryptées(sic) et directes » En français on ne dit pas crypter, on dit "chiffrer". Et non, les transactions ne sont pas chiffrées, elles sont signées. Nuance. Une intervention assez consternante d'un certain Michael Neuber (1:44): « l'état est responsable du bon déroulement de la vie économique dans le pays. Avec une monnaie électronique comme bitcoin il y a des risques de blanchiement d'argent, de fraude fiscale et de traffics en tous genres. » |
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Bonjour à tous,
Bienvenue, Puis-je acheter/payer directement via le site bitcoin central avec mon adresse Bitcoin? Si j'ai bien compris ce que tu veux dire: oui, tu peux payer un tiers en utilisant les bitcoins qui sont sur ton compte bitcoin-central. Il suffit de faire comme si tu rappatriais des bitcoins, sauf qu'au moment de leur donner une adresse bitcoin de rapatriement, tu ne donneras pas une des tiennes, mais plutôt une appartenant au tiers que tu veux payer. Quelle différence il y a si je paye avec le logiciel bitcoin? La différence c'est que dans un cas tu te sers de bitcoin-central comme d'une banque: ils détiennent tes bitcoins et quand tu veux payer quelqu'un avec ces bitcoins tu leur demandes de le faire à ta place. Ca peut être utile, mais à utiliser avec précaution amha. En particulier, ne laisse jamais trop longtemps une proportion significative du montant total de bitcoins que tu possèdes. Les gars de bitcoin-central ont beau avoir fait preuve de leur parfaite honnêteté depuis le début, si tu leur fait entièrement confiance tu passes à coté de l'intérêt principal de bitcoin: à savoir que tu peux détenir toi-même tes fonds. L'utilisation de ce logiciel ne me dérange pas en soit, cependant il faut un ordi qui tourne avec le logiciel bitcoin et télécharger l'essemble ou partie de blok chain pour que les transactions soient validées/visible je ne sais pas trop. Je trouve ça lourd de transférer mes bitcoin de mon adresse Bitcoin central vers le logiciel bitcoin, puis-je m'en passer? Oui, il existe des client légers qui consultent la base de données depuis un serveur distant, sans la télécharger. Electrum, Armory. Ou bien l'appli mobile développée par les gars de bitcoin-central: instawallet je crois. Il y en a plein d'autres. Fouine un peu sur le forum et tu trouveras. je te conseille quand même d'utiliser le client officiel. C'est vrai que le téléchargement des blocs est un peu long mais une fois que c'est fait ça marche très bien. Pour peu que tu disposes d'une machine ayant un accès régulier au net, ce serait dommage de se priver d'un client complet. |
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Salut a tous!
Salut et bienvenue. Je tourne sous Ubuntu et j'ai pas réussi a faire fonctionné le client "officiel"
Qu'est-ce qui n'a pas fonctionné? Normalement sous ubuntu le client standard fonctionne très bien. Dis nous-en plus ici où essaie de demander de l'aide sur freenode #bitcoin |
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Dommage que ce site ( http://www.bitcoin.fr/ ) ne soit pas actualise plus frequemment car en effet, ca manque cruellement actuellement  Un non-techie que cherche des infos abandonne assez vite Au fait il y a aussi l'article wikipedia. S'il manque des trucs ou si vous avez des suggestions, n'hésitez pas à en faire part sur la page de discussion. |
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Today I was reading an article about airless tyres and this led me to realize something funny about tyre producing companies such as Michelin or Goodyear. The business of those companies consists in reinventing the wheel. Literally. Why do you spell tyres with a y, but realize with a z? Or is there something x that I'm missing? I'm not a native english speaker so sometimes I can do such mistakes. Plus my spellchecker is not always set on "english" and I often don't want to bother setting it correctly each time I switch languages (I whish it'd do it automatically btw). |
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