110 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 9 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
Having perceivable characteristics is a characteristic itself. I wouldn't have pegged it as one, but it makes me curious what else we aren't considering.
When compared to gold, bitcoin is kind of establishing its own set of physics that bitcoin's other characteristics rely on. If those physics aren't perfect, some of which make psychosocial assumptions, it'll need to be capable of significant alteration.
Or flip it the other way: whatever physics it has will produce affordances in the psychosocial environment. Will we find those amenable to using it as money? Or perhaps: what sort of money will be amenable to those physics?
We've seen for ~15 years or whatever one answer to that. Can we get all the way with that sort of answer? This sort of butts up against our earlier exchange, about what the human mind (or enough of them) can accommodate, given other options and other environmental (including the social envt) circumstances.
For instance: we might consider that ETH has its own physics that are quite different. From my perspective, it's kind of nutty that people are treating ETH as something money-like, in the same speculative way they're treating btc that way, since btc is all-in on censorship resistance and decentralization and ETH is much less so. And yet people barely give a shit. They like silver nearly as well as gold.
Perhaps physics -- broadly construed -- isn't working like we thought?
reply
Perhaps physics -- broadly construed -- isn't working like we thought?
It's too early to tell. In Lyn's telling, you often have bimetal and trimetal systems but we can explain why they end up that way. One consequence of bitcoin being difficult to understand might be that it takes the market longer to see the difference between eth and btc.
reply
That's a really good point. I think sometimes of the way the "organism" of the world feels its way around. It had had to sense, like some ponderous amoeba over hundreds and thousands of years, how much of these metals there were in the world, and for prices and exchange rates to emerge as a result of those felt quantities.
Surely btc / eth must be like that too -- although literal propagation time is short (measured in milliseconds), the time for the full complexity to be absorbed in the course of that propagation will take a while. Maybe generations. How long did it take the idea for the number/numeral zero to propagate and be internalized? Hmm.
reply
I had to skim some of gold/silver stuff in Lyn's book (chapter 3 I think) because I found it repetitive ... which I think was part of the point of Lyn telling it ... "look how deterministic this is."
It took time for gold to be recognized as superior money because its scarcity, durability, verifiability, etc weren't obvious by holding it in your hand. But yeah, truth takes time to travel and some truths travel slower than others.
If you're interested in being a metaphor test subject, I started sharing this and I caught glimpse of myself in the mirror ...
I like to think markets are performing a forever gradient descent of a dynamic landscape; we are wrong and frequently caught on saddle points before we're right and if we're standing right on bad ground we sooner than later end up wrong again.
reply
I actually got kind of excited about bi / tri-metallism once I learned more about it.
I have a friend who, for the last number of years, would always go on about how silver was "historically under-valued" vs gold. But now it's clear (at least to me) that silver was useful insofar as it was less scarce than gold, and when you're carting the actual metal around and transacting with it, that's a useful property. But now that we're not carting it around nor transacting with it, its monetary premium is eroding. I would expect it to continue to erode, and now I can make a more coherent argument about why.
I like your metaphor -- something very like that at work in the dissonance-reduction world I think: the best model of reality is a lower-energy state; although the tricky notion of what "best" means complicates it as per usual.
reply