Feb 24, 2019
Meditations on Cash
Recent twitter dialogue around Bitcoin gravitated toward the view Bitcoin is the logical extension to Nash’s Ideal Money.
A view expressed here:
That Satoshi couldn’t have created Bitcoin without understanding modern monetary theory has previously been written; including concurrent themes with Keynes and Nash and what constitutes ‘Ideal’.
It has also been previously suggested [that] Satoshi designed Bitcoin without obvious purpose.
Two such writings appear mutually exclusive.
Mental Gymnastics of Bitcoin
It started with a tweet around Bitcoin’s intrinsic value, for which thread highlights are presented further down the page:
A reply was posted asserting Bitcoin is a fiat because the proof of work algorithm is otherwise useless: it can’t be used for any purpose [other] than Bitcoin.
This:
There was some further dialogue which culminated in:
Long Term we are all Anoesis
The above tweet from Yan led to introducing Nash’s Parallel Control, a futuristic insight from 1954 around a computer network of ‘electronic brains’ forming an equilibrium from a shared memory field — and the similarity to Bitcoin:
The last tweet [directly above] leads into a further point around words and monetary economic axioms — it has previously been written how Central Banks do indeed play language games as part of the psychology of inflation targeting and how inflation is reframed from one period of time to the next.
Peer to Peer Cash
A line from Nash alludes to a new form of thrift asymptotically limiting our inflationary practices, without explicitly defining what is meant by ‘inflationary practices’: how Nash disambiguated the term is a deep point, but something informally referenced here:
A question is asked:
A good reply:
Eris and the golden apple appears prevalent when it comes to money per se — and an eristic language construction appears to fit in this regard.
Aleksi and the Nash orientation would probably both agree however, that Bitcoin — at the computational base layer — can’t compete with Visa as a retail payment system and is inelastic in the sense how Central Banks currently influence monetary supply.
The Nash orientation would agree with the maximalist outlook, that Bitcoin forms a different kind of trust standard — with trust optimisation and financial stability [also] the remit of Central Banks.
Sovereign nations as peers and comparable quality in their cash [which] produces inter-relational stability at all levels is something [probably] universally agreeable in this regard — the final tweet presented, along these lines:
It may be difficult to speak of these things without flying too close to the sun — and so Satoshi applied a game theoretical solution to our money markets; making the golden apple digital, implicit and permissionless.
