Bizarre headline, isn't it? Sorry. It just ... coalesced spontaneously as ... a protein folding [1]. Lets try to decompress it. Compression is comprehension [2]. Decompression is experience. Firstly, I'll throw herein three bold statements - big separate mega-topics which I'll soon revisit by furnishing them with or backing them by their due Behest.io [3] full-fledged articles.:
1. The World is Fiat
I tend to generalize the term of fiat [4],[5] to not only currency [6] but to all the Sollen [7] approach to transactors. In my vocabulary Fiat as an umbrella, general term for all social interactiuon which requires external enforcement, i.e. all what's not trustless or self-enforcing like morals [8] or blockchain [9]. The whole system of monetized coercion. Or reciprocal - coercion backed fiat monetization [10]. (Note: monetization of coercion vs coercion of monetization are not related by an OR [11] operator, but they are typical chicken-and-egg problem [12] - even the smallest children know that eggs precede chicks!) All what requires trust [13]...
And,
2. Trust is Force
''You trust 'em only as much as you could make 'em to.''
Coercion or force or violence ... itself, IS currency per se - the primordial, the deeply preceding the emergence of Mankind one, and who manages to rigorize [14] it quantitatively will get and give us a TOE [15] unification of ecology and economics, i.e. instantly Nobel prizes! Not sure in which combination of fields. Simultaneously.
3. Money is Mnemonics
E.g. money in all forms is ... accountancy. Or book-keeping. Ledgers. Logs. Databases. Memory. They are even cognates [16] those - money and memory. Ancient truism.
It comes as necessity from the problem of simultaneity of transactions between autonomous agents, with other words - between automata [17], or self-thinkers, or those who are black-boxes [18] to each other. Regardless of whether the economy is mere barter, or it have uplifted one or more of its items to transactor/currency status.
Apparent feature of all accountancy systems is that they possess cardinality [19] of entries.
Up to now we know single-entry [20], double-entry [21] and tripple-entry [22] book-keeping system.
Not sure if a 'system' where everybody perceives, remembers and acts upon an isolated unshared 'ledger' of records on what's owed, contained only in its head - and runs it the way they could and want ... - counts for zero-entry book-keeping. Pun intended.
Can't wrap my head around negative or fractional numbers of book-keeping entries, nor I know what's the maximum practical and useful number of entries to juggle with. I expect Tau to bring together the, without any shadow of doubt, already available but dispersed across space and time bits and pieces of knowledge on accountancy entries cardinality into a general theory of transaction logging. It is necessary because, you know - an item is money (mnemonic [23] facility) ... transactor is accelerator [24], and general theory will give us a tool to know which monetary mechanism design [25] is the most powerful wealth growth booster.
Satoshi's blockchain is the first and only instance of successful implementation of the triple-entry book-keeping , so far, where credit and debit records and receipt are coined [26] into one. Self-enforcing log-book is as much (or not more) magical, or deus ex machina [27] solution then a horseless carriage vs a 'legacy' cart.
The blockchain catered total value is expectedly impressive grower itself. It took only 7-8 years to Bitcoin (and its imitations) to reach ~1% of what took 7-8 THOUSANDS of years to Gold [28] to get.
BUT, we still live in a predominantly Fiat, double-entry book-keeping world:
Visualize the modern world as a forest of centralized 2-entry ledgers:
From the several hundreds of tree stems - the Central Banks [29], though the thousands and thousands of commercial banks - fractional reserve franchisees of the Central Banks, down to the individual humans and firms credit-debit records.
A vast centralized fractal of 2-entry ledgers of ledgers. Lined into one by the global meta-ledgers - provided by international institutions like BIS [30].
Important Note: ... which I must make here - Lots of crap talk we've heard about how Blockchain is against Fiat, how it will replace it, how it frees us from the illths of the ancient regime [31] . NOTHING like that! The truth is that, for now, we do not have even the slightest idea or hint about how we could decentralize or detrust interpersonal voluntary exchange! Geography and history, e.g. nature and culture are forces to reckon. The propaganda suggestion that fiat money is kinda fake, printed at a wish, valuable only because we all believe in them ... is one of biggest nonsense I've ever heard.
As in any forest, the tree size and power varies. And matters. USD is the Yggdrasil [32] of the meatspace [33] of the global fiat mainstream Swartzwald [34] ! (Just like BTC is in the cyberspace one. It is not occasional at all that both are so perfect systemic benchmark matches.) In the ocean of fiat, USD is a giant landmass, a Pangea which is nearly impossible to go around of. The force of 20 000 golf balls of Plutonium coupled with same number of office dustbins of LiD [35] . And 1000+ military bases scattered around the world. And comprehensive coverage of the sea routes to guarantee that the global trade goes by the books. And working supremacy of law system as an antidote of internal corruption decay of the system... Shall the USD survive the Blockchaincalypsis? Of course! Taxcoins [36] are always needed. The runaway crypto-fication of the fiat monetary systems only makes the due payments of geopolitical services more and more unescapable. And more and more precise and fairer. With higher resolution and lower lag.
Backed by force means that the the strongest force is the most trustful. Like all those currencies who belong to the hall of glory of the millennial monumental transactors.: Hellenic drachma [37] - survived so far as a currency name in the Gulf [38], Roman solidus [39], Spanish silver dollar [40], etc. ... used to be. Mainstreamers - for being backed by the biggest force. (Mentioning the Force, we simply can not go without a Star Wars quote [41], I'm afraid - the best and most inexorable thesaurus of cliches.)
Lets close now the three side notes of dictionary intro here, and go back to PROCRUSTICS:
First, yes, it is about that antiquity gangsta, the psychopathic dropout of the noble blacksmiths profession - Procrustes [42].:
''who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed.''
Secondly, the etymology turtledoves [43] who explained to us what Behest is [3], clarify that:
Don't look exactly like pigeons, do they?
Thirdly, Procrustics by the great philosopher Stanislaw Lem [44]. This is from Wikipedia:
''In 1959 science fiction novel Eden by Stanisław Lem, Procrustics is the name of a fictitious information-theory based social engineering discipline of molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secretive hidden rulers, to create a hideous form of social control in which the very existence of the governing powers is denied and each individual appears to themselves to be free yet are being manipulated and controlled. One example described in the novel is "concentration camps" without any guards which are designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently on their "free" will.''
Last but not least, it is no surprise that this so much meaning laden word entered the vast fields of mathematics, too - [45], [46], [47], to denote so important concepts. Procrustean transformations:
''Hence, it may change the size, but not the shape of an ... object.''
I think this is enough of explanation to tie it up into:
The Fiat is procrustic because it is ripe to be transcaled!
Fiat is saturated. It can not grow the old ways any more. It is really dearer and dearer to be grown. It reached its internal limits.
Fiat (as global fractal integration of all double-entry accountancy books) is a narrative.
Fiat is procrustic, because being unaffordable thing to cover it all: it omits, it cuts off, it keeps out, excludes, discriminates, sequesters ...
As a narrative it tells a story of wealth, but leaves out so vast unsung, though present, riches.
The global fiat bards memory is too weak to memorize it all and they are not clever enough to distinguish the true from false entries ...
The fiat Yggdrasil Norns [48] fingers are weak to handle all threads and to manage to interweave them all into the meta-ledger ...
Giant mass of economic data left lying in waste, unused. And that's REALLY bad cause the data about the system state is the fuel for its own self-reinforcing positive feedback loop [49]. Yeah, data as the new oil [50], but literally.
The estimates are that as much as up to 80% of all economic information stays off the record [51].
Cf.: Hernando de Soto Polar [52], who estimated that.:
''The existence of such massive exclusion generates two parallel economies, legal and extra legal. An elite minority enjoys the economic benefits of the law and globalization, while the majority of entrepreneurs are stuck in poverty, where their assets—adding up to more than US$10 trillion worldwide—languish as dead capital in the shadows of the law.''
in his 2000, ''The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else'' [53]
Cf.: aka Bazaaristan [54].:
''Across the globe, 1.8 billion people -- a quarter of the world's population -- work off the books each day. They are paid in cash for the goods they sell and the services they provide, and due to their ubiquity, there's a word for these merchants in nearly every language. As Robert Neuwirth reports, in French colonies, they're known as débrouillards -- self-starters, entrepreneurs, all outside the bureaucratic system. They might be vendors selling revolutionary goods in Egypt's Tahrir Square, Nigerians selling mobile phones, or the guy down the street hawking flowers on the corner. Whoever they are, they work in the world's fastest-growing economy: System D. As Neuwirth writes, System D, slang for "l'economie de la débrouillardise," is the crucial blackmarket, providing opportunities where the regulated global economy has failed. Its value is estimated at roughly $10 trillion, meaning, as Neuwirth points out, that, "If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second largest economy in the world." The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicts that two-thirds of the world's workers will be employed in System D as soon as 2020.''
Cf.: the world unbanked population phenomenon [55]
''Two billion people worldwide do not have a bank account or access to a financial institution via a mobile phone, or any other device.''
The ancient worldmap picture up at the bizarre headline, denotes exactly this 'Here Be Dragons' situation of the Blockchain-unboosted yet Fiat finance.
All these examples demonstrate not a conspiracy of a kind, but mere and obvious fiat unscaling symptomatics.
Probably in the old centralized way, for a double-entry book-keeping system in order to check, record and run all facts of relevant economic information, would have to consume more than what the economy makes as a whole! :)
This inevitably crosses with the important topics of the network scaling effects - for merely linking all the dots means automatically n^2 bigger economy [56]. Without to add anything new, but by just noticing and accounting of the existing wealth.
We have probably dozens of TIMES bigger economy than we realize! Tantalus suffering [57].
On the comparative costs of the accounting systems there are three studies, [29], [58], [59] which I particularly value, and which put into a neat perspective together with the network scaling effects [60] are definitely subject of separate near future blog posts of mine.
Now scroll-up back to the ''Important note'' above, please.
You see?
Blockchain is not the Fiat killer. It is its Transcaler [61] !!
And Tauchain being - together with so many other things - the generalization and the generalizer of all possible blockchains in particular and all possible accountancies in general - is the transcaler of the transcalers.
And as effect - the ultimate economy (incl. economy governance [62]) Accelerator [24].
Resources.:
- [*] - head picture quoted from the splendid https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@herebedragons/here-be-dragons-map
- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
- [2] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/how-fast-how-small-and-how-powerful
- [3] - https://steemit.com/blockchain/@karov/behest-for-tauchain
- [4] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/fiat
- [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
- [6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency
- [7] - https://legalcontent.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/das-sein-das-sollen/
- [8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
- [9] - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- [10] - https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-mind-blowing-feature-of-cryptocurrency-860c3f25f1fb
- [11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_disjunction
- [12] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg
- [13] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/trust
- [14] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigour#Mathematical_proof
- [15] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
- [16] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/money
- [17] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/automaton
- [18] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box
- [19] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality
- [20] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-entry_bookkeeping_system
- [21] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system
- [22] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_accounting_and_triple-entry_bookkeeping & https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/triple-entry-bookkeeping-bitcoin-1392069656/
- [23] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic
- [24] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/tauchain-the-hanson-engine
- [25] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
- [26] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/coin
- [27] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
- [28] - http://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/
- [29] - https://www.scribd.com/document/354688866/Bitcoin-A-5-8-Million-Valuation-Crypto-Currency-and-A-New-Era-of-Human-Cooperation (cf.: Appendix A)
- [30] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements
- [31] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_R%C3%A9gime
- [32] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil
- [33] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meatspace
- [34] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest :)
- [35] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydride#Lithium_deuteride
- [36] - http://ohad.io/
- [37] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetradrachm
- [38] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirham
- [39] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_(coin)
- [40] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History
- [42] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
- [43] - https://thesaurus.plus/related/bed_of_procrustes/procrustean_bed
- [44] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/tauchain-over-de-latil
- [45] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes_analysis
- [46] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_Procrustes_problem
- [47] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes_transformation
- [48] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norns
- [49] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback
- [50] - https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/10/big-data-new-oil-or-snake-oil/
- [51] - http://www.eces.org.eg/MediaFiles/Uploaded_Files/%7B50FC1ABC-F724-4530-9AC4-D58B777DFDA6%7D_ECESDLS11e%20Appendices.pdf
- [52] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar
- [53] - https://yendieu.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/the-mystery-of-capital.pdf
- [54] - http://foreignpolicy.com/slideshow/welcome-to-bazaaristan/
- [55] - http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-unbanked-population-in-6-charts-2017-8?r=UK&IR=T&IR=T
- [56] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
- [57] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus
- [58] - http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
- [59] - https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-production/ & https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-banking/ & https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-real-costs-dollar/ & https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-economic-environmental-costs-bitcoin-mining/ & https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29bcjw/under_the_microscope_the_true_costs_of_gold/
- [60] - https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/scaling-the-surprising-mathematics-of-life-and-civilization-49ee18640a8
- [61] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/tauchain-transcaling
- [62] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
18qSKUUTAGw1uL53simrSiZ6pJpfxKACvj for research support. Thanks.
Copyright © 2018 Georgi Karov. All rights reserved.