Steem and steemit, are off course a very welcoming and great development and great initiative as is Bitshares, and all are build on the same amazing Graphene technology.
But in my opinion it has a critical design fault and structural flaw, as is the case with all cryptocurrencies, and our well known fiat currencies, which include our civilization.
Separation.
Money is intimately related to our identity as discrete and separate selves. As the saying goes " Money is the root of all evil". But why should it be?
After all money is in its most basic function: simple exchange, to connect human gift to human needs. Instead the Power monsters have done the opposite: an agent of scarcity!
Money has created all crises - economic, health, ecological, political and manifests as separation from each other in dissolution of community, nature, destruction of our environment.
Science its ideology, technology its accomplice, money its agent.
We live in a world of abundance, where materials, food and energy go to waste. Halve of the world starves, while the other halve wastes enough to feed the first halve!
Love of Money.
Greed, is the main factor which drives the love of money, to hoard it! The problem with greed (an effect), is that it is a symptom or effect and not the cause of the problem.
We live in super abundance, in the western "rich" worlds, and still crave "financial security", we chase this "financial security" to enslave even further. Scarcity is or its perception creates greed as a response. Money has changed our super abundance of our world in scarcity!
So is money the problem then? NO, it is the kind of money, the money that evaporates, which is.
So you might think what is the solution? and Yes there is a solution.
Money with the opposite characteristics is the solution: abundance, not scarcity; generosity, not greed; and sustainability, not ruin.
The money characteristic of today is Usury, you know it as Interest!
A famous recent quote from Bernard Leitaer's book, and from other ancient books before him:
Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback,
people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people
walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged
negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of
the year, like harvests or whenever someone's barn needed big repairs after a
storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had
brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday,
others would aid them in return. One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an
elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile.
When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to
exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. "Poor
people," he said, "so primitive." The farmer's wife overheard him and
challenged the stranger, "Do you think you can do a better job handling
chickens?" "Chickens, no," responded the stranger, "But
there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle." "Oh yes, how
so?" asked the woman. "See that tree there?" the stranger
replied. " Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large
cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I'll explain the better way."And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each
round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each
represented the value of one chicken. "Now you can trade and bargain with
the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens," he explained. It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with the shiny shoes and inspiring hat."Oh, by the way," he added after every family
had received their 10 rounds, "in a year's time, I will come back and sit
under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th
round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made
possible in your lives."But where will the 11th round come
from?" asked the farmer with the six chickens. "You'll see,"
said the man with a reassuring smile. Assuming that the population and its annual production
remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen?
Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of
each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed
their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others. So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in
before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the
rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the
unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation
that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating
a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.
Only really 3 ways this can end: Inflation, Bankruptcy or Growth. The fate of any economy based on usury/interest system.
You could get more cowhides and create more tokens/currency, or one of the 11 families would go bankrupt, or increase the number of chickens so new rounds would have the same value.
In the real economy all pressures act at the same time: bankruptcy pressures insecurity, which drives to "make" more money through inflationary/productive measures. Of those two, inflation is only temporary and will push the grow-or-die imperative slightly into the future, so in other words because of the money, competition, insecurity and greed are part of our economy.
The third pressure is perpetual growth, because of interest, at anytime the amount of money owed is greater then the amount of money in existence, to create new money (non-inflationary), we have to breed more chickens, we have to create more goods and services. The principal way of doing this is to convert something that was once for free! Forrest into timber, ideas into intellectual property, social reciprocity into paid services and music into a product.
Would you like to get rich? Here is a business idea that, in
one form or another, has worked spectacularly for thousands of years. Very simply,
find anything that people do for themselves or each other for free. Then take
it away from them: make it illegal, inconvenient, or otherwise unavailable.
Then sell back to them what you have taken. Granted, usually no one does this
consciously, but that has been the net effect of culture and technology over
the last several thousand years.
The imperative of perpetual growth implicit in interest is what drives the relentless conversion of life, world, and spirit into money.
Completing the vicious circle, the more of life we convert into money, the more we need money to live. Usury, NOT MONEY, is the root of all evil!
Inducing competition and replacing personal relationships with paid services, it rips the fabric of community.
Gold does not harmonize with the character of our goods. Gold and straw, gold and petrol, gold and guano, gold and bricks, gold and iron, gold and hides! Only a wild fancy, a monstrous hallucination, only the doctrine of “value” can bridge the gulf. Commodities in general, straw, petrol, guano and the rest can be safely exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay, break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving properties can it effect exchange rapidly, securely and cheaply. For such money can never, on any account, be preferred by anyone to goods.
by Silvio Gesell
A Demurrage based crypto currency system.
Steemit has some very well designed features, but to be able to create a better "money", some fundamental changes have to made for it to be adopted to become a "free-money" system. Actually there is only one cryptocurrency which uses demurrage, to my knowledge.
Everything in life is subject to Natural Laws, renewal - decay cycles, Demurrage currency merely applies those natural laws on natural commodities, whose continuing value requires maintenance.
Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money.
PART 2 WILL GO INTO "THE DEMURRAGE BASED CRYPTO CURRENCY SYSTEM FOR STEEMIT"