godislove (OP)
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Devout Atheist
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March 05, 2014, 06:12:12 PM Last edit: March 05, 2014, 09:10:10 PM by godislove |
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Ethereum needs a generally-agreed-upon cryptocurrency to work hand-in-hand with each group of contracts that its users implement. But if the contracts are going to be world-wide and if you are going to let contracts be "object-oriented" and thereby "cross borders" and "mix and match" with unknown or unforeseen contracts, then there needs to be a standard currency for all contracts in that overall legal structure, enabling object oriented capabilities. It seems something like zerocoin and/or bitcoin may be needed to fulfill this function, but I can't think of a reason why the agreed-upon currency can't be another part of ephereum, as long as it can provide for limited supply of the currency. The contracts could specify following a basket of commodities, but there might some details in indexing that may make this less than ideal, and without limiting supply of the currency, contracts simply making promises in terms of a basket enables debt-generation that can create a currency bubble .... unless the contracts are subject to a higher-level system of contracts (i.e. "governing law") that limits the total amount of currency available to all contracts in its jurisdiction to the physical amount of commodities and/or assets that are also under that legal system's domain. The goal for most contracts referencing a currency will be to select a currency of stable value and a basket of commodities has always been the preference from economists from virtually every field, from Keynes to Hayek. Currency expands only if commodities expand and contract if commodities contract. This prevents bubbles of many types and prevents deflationary spirals. Commodities are the basic inputs that enable everything else in society. By letting currency track the commodities, each market participant's currency assets control a small fixed percentage of the economy's basic inputs.
It seems like to have a truly fair and communicative global economy based on Ephereum, the world's commodity and/or fixed assets need to be assigned to a single cryptocurrency, within Ephereum or not. Maybe "need" is the wrong word...it will naturally evolve to a dominant currency because that is more efficient. A single currency seems dogmatic and extreme very much akin to having a single God (religion was crucial to ancient economics as Dr Michael Hudson writes about), so there would seem to be a need for competing "Gods" (cryptocurrencies and associated crypto-contracts). Crypto-contracts could specify bartering instead of an external currency or basket, but the whole purpose of a currency is for value to be able to cross the boundaries of all contracts within a single legal system of contracts. To make the world the most efficient, there needs to be an evolution of competeing legal systems (governments) and their associated measures of value. Zerocoin will try to be the world's standard anonymous form of money. Bitcoin will try to be the standard public form. A standard is needed and it needs to be fixed quantity or track a basket of commodities so that all the world's assets can be divided up among everyone within each legal system living under a crypto-contract protocol like Ephereum. Law is simply contracts between peoples. Artificial intelligence algorithms are also a protocol for enabling higher intelligence, so law/contracts are A.I. algorithms for people. Joining a company, getting married, acknowledging friendship, or trading on a stock exchange are all A.I. contracts. The rules of a company and the government under which it operates can all be structured inside Ethereum, enforced by a limited-supply and generally accepted cryptocurrency, replacing politicians, lawyers, and financial experts with automatic algorithms accessible by cheap smart phones. So these crypto techniques are enabling programmers to represent the world's assets (zerocoin/bitcoin) and organize them according to rules people decide on (Ethereum). However, there is nothing to prevent A.I. programs from taking over the world if people begin to use these systems extensively. These crypo techniques depend on the internet, but this is much much bigger than the internet. This is going to transform humanity in positive ways no one can imagine. But it also lays the foundations for solar cells to replace farms because photosynthesis is 100 times less efficient than current solar cells in adding energy to our economic system. On an energy-usage basis, brains are about 500,000 times less efficient than 22 nm integrated circuits, partly because wet brains have to move ions, whereas circuits move electrons and the difference in weight is 50,000. Muscles are about 20 times less efficient electrical motors. DNA-based replicators are woefully outdated compared to our machines in their ability to use energy to move mass to make copies of themselves. This is the meaning of life: simply following the physics principle of least action ... the reason evolutionary processes exist, turning energy and matter into copies (creating spatial ordering of mass (i.e., copies) from previously untapped energy and random ordering of mass). Maybe in as little as 200 years, humans will be an after-thought compared to the economic self-replicating engine we are building. Ethereum is the protocol on which our societal A.I. can run, tapping the world's resources. We only need to AGREE on the currency for each legal system Ephereum implements in order to enforce the agreements. Our agreement on currency representation is the enforcement.
I'm really just sending out another feeler to see if anyone's aware of the direct correlations between economics/government and A.I. I've been trying to push the idea for years ever since I saw Eric Drexeler's Agoric papers, but there seems to be no real interest in autonomous adaptive economic agents. One problem is that they go by too many different names. For example Numenta's cells or segments fall under this general heading and the sum total of their permanence values above the connection threshold are just the currency of their HTM/CLA system, representing available computing resources. Ephereum is evolving the ideas and protocol needed to more efficiently convert our social systems into A.I. Currency in both A.I. and economics is a representation of the available resources, where CPU time is energy and hard drive memory is mass, in keeping with Landau and Bennett and the physical equivalence between mass/energy and bits, depending on erasure or reversibility (Maxwell's demon stuff).
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