Pegasus Island: Thought experiments on the nature of money and economies.

[americanpegasus]

This sounds great and im holding XMR since ages ago, but I still think there's no way Monero will ever surpass BTC. BTC's network effect it's too strong at this point, and the powers that be will love a public, non-anonymous-by-default blockchain. Unfortunately, i think Monero may become the #1 coin used in darkweb or something, but not mainstream.

 
  
I won't deny that bitcoin has a massive network effect going on right now, but let's consider other historical examples where massive network effects have been disrupted by superior/different ideologies or technologies.  
  
Consider the Myspace disruption by Facebook.  Social media was just starting out and right as Myspace began to take off, here comes Facebook with a competing but fundamentaly superior product that totally destroyed MySpace.  
  
Consider how the US Dollar came out of nowhere to become the reserve currency for the world (despite our little country only being a few hundred years old).  
  
Consider how the Super Nintendo owned the video game market in the 1990's but the Playstation came along and obliterated that lead (and then lost it to the Wii).  
  
Consider how the Muslim religion spread with fervor a thousand years ago, despite Christianity already having hundreds of years of a "network effect".  
  
Consider the fact that you are now reading and participating in a thread by the famous americanpegasus, despite the fact that no one had ever heard of me a few years ago.  

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[johnyj]

In modern society, very often majority of the demand is fulfilled, each producer are dumping excessive goods in an attempt to get most liquid assets (usually money) from the other, then it does not benefit anyone

Even in a modern society, imagine Alice produces Californian sparkling wine, and sells them for $10/bottle to Bob. Bob buys 100 bottles, pays a $10 dollar shipping fee and sells them for $12 dollars/bottle in Japan. Then 100 people buys Bob's wine.

Alice made money, Bob made money, and the 100 people made money because otherwise they would have to pay $20 dollars to get that bottle of sparkling wine shipped to them. So in effect, they each saved 8 dollars.

The scenario you described is not low demand, there are still demand for those sparkling wines

In reality, it is very likely that Alice is producing sparkling Californian wines and Bob is producing is sparkling Canadian wines and Keiko is producing sparking Hokkaido wines and they all compete on the international wine market and there will be a price war to drop their price even below the production cost. And there is a race to drop the production cost and shipping cost further by using robots and drone delivery, and fire more workers, just because the winner could sell a bit more wine and get some fiat money

Worse than that, since both Alice and Bob and Keiko could get loan from their bank, the ability to defeat their competitors will depends on how long they could sustain the operation at a loss (the loss is coverd by a long term loan). After 5 years of price war, eventually Alice and Bob are out of business because the Japanese central bank gave Keiko 1 billion dollar loan, helping her to occupy 90% of the international wine market, so that future human would mostly drink wine from Japan  

[risingtide]

It's funny, you can think of Google (in place of currency) and information (in place of trading goods) for islands that want to stay informed of other islands. I also see this as a problem with modern information: Google acts as an intermediary but starts diverting more and more searches to its own properties, to make themselves $$, or else they can include you in their results if you pay them $$ (Adwords). In that way Google becomes a reification of the natural curiousity we have to search one another for information. In a generation we might all be almost completely dependent on Google instead of the historical oral tradition of passing down vital cultural information.

/ end tangent

[username18333]

In a generation we might all be almost completely dependent on Google instead of the historical oral tradition of passing down vital cultural information.

Forsooth, despite its present relevance, the university lecture will have been forsaken within but one generation.  

[risingtide]

Forsooth, despite its present relevance, the university lecture will have been forsaken within but one generation.  

Universities have their own coming storm to deal with ... the rising tuition costs aren't sustainable.