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Post by Enderminion on Jul 6, 2017 21:41:49 GMT
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Post by matterbeam on Jul 7, 2017 15:27:12 GMT
Most of what people own even in fiat isn't physical. If everyone attempted to withdraw even 10% of what they own the banks would be out of actual money to hand out, or so I once heard. As I understand, fiat is dying; Japan started accepting bitcoin as some sort of money this year, though I don't know if it's exactly legal tender you could buy a cup of coffee with. Things are shifting even without the decentralising influence of a new frontier in space. That's obvious. They try to obscure it with thick terminology, but banks can basically create finance out of nothing. There's a base level of money they cannot re-lend to others out of every loan they accept. That is the minimum reserve. For the US, it's 10% and for the EU it's 1%. Effectively, if you depose $1000 to a bank, they have to keep $100 of that, but they can loan out $900 to someone else. If those $900 get deposed to another bank, they can do the same; keeping $90 and loaning out $810, ad infinitum. Even though there were originally only $1000 dollars and they still have those $1000, the bank now owes $2710. This is how Black Friday happened, and this is how the stock market crash happens - if anyone ever borrows more money than the bank can return, the entire system collapses. And the bitcoin doesn't solve that. As long as there are banks that can loan out money that isn't there, there will always be a measure of market instability. Gold-based finance was the best, anyway. Paper bills make for an inefficient railgun projectile. Small nitpicks, I'm studying Finance: -Loaning out money you can't pay back is how capitalism works (the capital in capitalism). If this system did not exist, human civilisation would grow and develop much more slowly, such as the days of medieval stagnation. The critical point here is that if you loan out this money, it is because you are confident that it will be paid back with real value and both lender and burrower become richer. You're betting that the future is bright and wealth will grow, so you provide the tools for it to grow. Imagine if everyone had to buy homes in lump sums. -Banks not being able to pay out cash to depositors is bank insolvency, and fears of complete insolvency cause/are caused by bank runs. Bank runs are common in stock market crashes, but the two are not the same thing. Stock market crashes are crisis of confidence: people do not believe that the stock's value is equal to its actual worth. The majority of a stock's worth is its future value and growth. It's just that banks commonly put their money in stock markets, so market crashes affect the banking system. - Gold-based finance could never work in a society that ties its worth to the rapid growth of technological investments.
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Post by Pttg on Jul 7, 2017 20:21:01 GMT
Gold is also fiat. There's only very limited utility to gold, so it's just as arbitrary as saying that these specific pieces of paper are valuable. The difference is, with a fiscal system in place, a competent government can adjust the flow of money in such a way as to increase the standard of living, or else can temporarily create money to stave off a recession.
Bitcoins are going to crash the day that an effective quantum computer hits the market.
If you want to have a currency backed with innate value, back it on stored kilojoules. Every action consumes energy, and everyone who produces energy is enabling all other activity. Plus, it'll move the brightest people of the next generation away from making faster network connections from New York to Chicago, and into making more efficient and energy-dense storage and electricity production.
I'd add the caviot that power producers must be zero-waste -- otherwise you have negative externalities where people burn coal like savages instead of using a civilized power source like gravity-confined fusion or turbo-electric fission.
In terms of space resources, energy is even more essential. If your flight to the belt and back for minerals costs more joules than mining them here on Mars, it's a wasteful proposition by definition, no matter how many dollars a kg the osmium is on Earth.
Plus, it makes for interesting complications that should cause more effective investment. Buy 10 kg of U-233 as an investment, and unless it's in a reactor it's only losing value. It'll stop speculators and futures sellers from eating up resources that could be used on the market.
And it leaves levers for organizations to work with. Provide an instant energy rebate and people will buy more solar panels, and then they'll have both e creds and a steady energy income, boosting the overall economy!
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utilitas
Junior Member
I can do this all day.
Posts: 59
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Post by utilitas on Jul 8, 2017 3:11:37 GMT
Gold is also fiat. There's only very limited utility to gold, so it's just as arbitrary as saying that these specific pieces of paper are valuable. The difference is, with a fiscal system in place, a competent government can adjust the flow of money in such a way as to increase the standard of living, or else can temporarily create money to stave off a recession. Bitcoins are going to crash the day that an effective quantum computer hits the market. If you want to have a currency backed with innate value, back it on stored kilojoules. Every action consumes energy, and everyone who produces energy is enabling all other activity. Plus, it'll move the brightest people of the next generation away from making faster network connections from New York to Chicago, and into making more efficient and energy-dense storage and electricity production. I'd add the caviot that power producers must be zero-waste -- otherwise you have negative externalities where people burn coal like savages instead of using a civilized power source like gravity-confined fusion or turbo-electric fission. In terms of space resources, energy is even more essential. If your flight to the belt and back for minerals costs more joules than mining them here on Mars, it's a wasteful proposition by definition, no matter how many dollars a kg the osmium is on Earth. Plus, it makes for interesting complications that should cause more effective investment. Buy 10 kg of U-233 as an investment, and unless it's in a reactor it's only losing value. It'll stop speculators and futures sellers from eating up resources that could be used on the market. And it leaves levers for organizations to work with. Provide an instant energy rebate and people will buy more solar panels, and then they'll have both e creds and a steady energy income, boosting the overall economy! Large-scale (megajoule and above) power storage is virtually impossible unless you use ridiculous methods such as enormous superconducting magnetic energy storage installations or otherwise. Currently, basically all energy that gets pumped into the grid gets used immediately (in relativistic terms). There are many megawatts of energy being exchanged around any given national network every second - you cannot expect any battery to be able to have that much throughput without absurdly huge parallel arrangements. There is also no thing such as zero-waste, as practically demonstrated by the automobile industry. Even if you use only solar panels and the pure, God-given fusion of the Sun to make your buck, making those solar panels and electrical installations still made tons of industrial waste in the form of acids, catalysts and leftover plastics. Basing some currency on the amount of energy available is a great idea with a judiciary hell behind it. It'd involve teaching the senate about thermodynamics, fuel density and efficiency - and that isn't happening in the next century at the very least. It makes sense for a reasonable space civilization, but we're anything but.
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Post by thorneel on Jul 8, 2017 10:06:46 GMT
Solar panel toxic waste wouldn't be that bad if so many solar panel-pushing polities actually made plans to deal with it, instead of leaving the (rather huge) problem to those suckers of the next generation - which is surprisingly the antithesis of the think-of-the-children justification they generally give. Or if they went for solar-thermal, which doesn't leave you with so many tons of toxic waste after 25 years. PV is at the moment leading to an environmental disaster because of the current conjuncture and that particular instance of criminal incompetence of that particular crop of politicians, but this is in no way a foregone conclusion. Now, assuming that those particular problems are fixed, solar, nuclear and other large-scale energy generators point out one problem with a kJ-based economy: you risk massive inflation. Powerplants are becoming cheaper, and potential growth is enormous, particularly as powerplants are now more or less literally printing money, whether there is need for so much energy or not.
Also, I am definitely stealing "gravity-confined fusion".
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Post by Enderminion on Jul 8, 2017 12:56:30 GMT
antimatter and other unobtaium to
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Post by michalo on Jul 8, 2017 13:18:46 GMT
If we can assume that we have 3d printers that can print anything, basing currency on any physical material will cause ridiculous inflation, because count of self-replicating asteroid miners will grow exponentially until they eat all asteroids in solar system. I also seriously doubt Pttg claim, that quantum computer will break cryptocurrencies, unless it is PROVEN that no asymmetric encryption can hold against quantum computer. The cryptocurrencies are mostly limited to not have much inflation, are easy to transport and store, and are good investment in a world where every material's (energy's also) price is getting halved every month or so.
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Post by Pttg on Jul 8, 2017 17:53:03 GMT
Ok, make it net-zero waste. All waste produced by the operation needs to be recycled using energy produced by the system. Ta-dah, now there's an economic incentive to produce more lifecycle-efficient power sources.
Also, I said bitcoins. Maybe you can find a different mathematical trick that will hold up to quantum decryption but isn't one-time pads. Good luck with that.
Could I get a source on the amount of waste solar produces per KW/h compared to other sources? Full lifecycle waste for each?
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Post by Enderminion on Jul 8, 2017 20:03:47 GMT
net zero is 100% effecient, which is impossible
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Post by thorneel on Jul 8, 2017 22:00:54 GMT
Could I get a source on the amount of waste solar produces per KW/h compared to other sources? Full lifecycle waste for each? This was making news a few days ago: www.environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisisNot sure how reliable those are, but it is at least in line with what I consistently heard. The comparison with nuclear waste is a bit strange, though. At equal mass, nuclear waste is a much bigger problem than toxic waste, so the waste problem would actually be more or less on the same order if dealt with properly. The real problem they are pointing out is that, contrary to nuclear waste, there are no plans to deal with it properly - apart from Europe who apparently has laws forcing selling companies to plan for it. But we'll have to wait and see how well that will work. Note that future PV technology may produce less waste, and so may non-PV solar energy like solar-thermal, time will tell. So they didn't even make bitcoin into a quantum-resistant algorithm? What the hell were they thinking? Also I'm pretty sure there exist quantum-resistant (non-one-time-pad) crypto already.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jul 9, 2017 2:10:32 GMT
Could I get a source on the amount of waste solar produces per KW/h compared to other sources? Full lifecycle waste for each? This was making news a few days ago: www.environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisisNot sure how reliable those are, but it is at least in line with what I consistently heard. The comparison with nuclear waste is a bit strange, though. At equal mass, nuclear waste is a much bigger problem than toxic waste, so the waste problem would actually be more or less on the same order if dealt with properly. The real problem they are pointing out is that, contrary to nuclear waste, there are no plans to deal with it properly - apart from Europe who apparently has laws forcing selling companies to plan for it. But we'll have to wait and see how well that will work. Note that future PV technology may produce less waste, and so may non-PV solar energy like solar-thermal, time will tell. So they didn't even make bitcoin into a quantum-resistant algorithm? What the hell were they thinking? Also I'm pretty sure there exist quantum-resistant (non-one-time-pad) crypto already. And, uh, nuclear waste can be made into battery when combined with diamond.
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Post by Pttg on Jul 9, 2017 3:31:59 GMT
net zero is 100% effecient, which is impossible All it means is that some portion of the energy the source produces is set aside to deal with the waste; in a nuclear context, that means using breeder reactors and some of the electricity goes into storing the low-grade waste safely. In the case of solar, your solar factory might be mandated to buy back used solar panels at a fair price and recycle them. Fossil fuel power would need to release 0 net CO2 into the atmosphere, but could concievably landfill pure carbon dust or something. That last one in particular might not produce net energy, but that's a failing of the power source.
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Post by Pttg on Jul 9, 2017 3:33:30 GMT
The output is trivial, though. It might be like having a candle that just never goes out and weighs a couple kilos.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jul 9, 2017 4:05:25 GMT
The output is trivial, though. It might be like having a candle that just never goes out and weighs a couple kilos. Perfect for slow interstellar probes.
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utilitas
Junior Member
I can do this all day.
Posts: 59
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Post by utilitas on Jul 9, 2017 7:36:01 GMT
So they didn't even make bitcoin into a quantum-resistant algorithm? What the hell were they thinking? Also I'm pretty sure there exist quantum-resistant (non-one-time-pad) crypto already. There's plenty of those. It's called just using a longer hash for encryption The problem with quantum, and also the reason why it isn't being used in large yet, is that we can't use it in large scale without horrible errors. Anything above a dozen qubits (and frequently a lot less) is prone to failure due to multiplying quantum states. As long as this holds up and we don't find a way to bypass the inherent instability of quantum systems, just using a longer hash will make you perfectly safe.
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