Comments by "k98killer" (@k98killer) on "Will AGI Abolish Money? My predictions about crypto and the future of money" video.

  1. Other than some technical nitpicks, I concur. Hopefully, wealth inequality will be solved through voluntary action: the overly wealthy should become more generous, and those who receive gifts should become more grateful. As an anecdote, I have noticed that needful people to whom I have been generous have tended to become resentful; I have found such experiences to be powerfully dissuasive.
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  2. On the topic of blockchain and cryptocurrency: a blockchain is not a distributed ledger. A blockchain is simply a single chain directed acyclic graph of blocks in which each added block is the new root of the DAG (i.e. a graph where each vertex has a degree of 1 or 2). "Distributed ledger" is also a misnomer: all current systems use a replicated ledger, not a distributed one, within a replicated state machine. The ledger data is embedded within and distributed through the blockchain. A truly distributed ledger would be one in which transaction data is retained local to the transactors rather than replicated across the whole globe. This is theoretically possible, and it can be done without a blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto described his innovation of using proof-of-work to order transactions as a distributed timestamping server, but global consensus is not necessary in every scenario. It is theoretically possible to create a cryptocurrency without a blockchain as typically envisioned, using correspondent credit relationships. I have done a lot of research and preliminary experiments toward this end, and I have written a number of dependency packages for the project. I expect to have a working prototype done sometime next year. The only purpose for blockchain is global consensus, and this necessarily involves throughput limitations. Globally replicated state also creates a massive data retention burden upon network participants. For most intents and purposes, blockchain is a slower, shittier database.
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  3. I imagine that monetary history is not an obsession for you like it has been for me, so I do not want to provide overly harsh criticism, but there are some corrections worth noting. First, the archaeological evidence indicates that the first form of money was credit: favors were traded, and debts were recorded. Endogenous money can be created between any willing transactors, and exogenous forms of money are only necessary for scaling an economy or settling endogenous money balances. There is a strong argument that exogenous money was invented specifically to augment the more primordial endogenous money. Second, gold is not deflationary and has historically not been deflationary. The amount of gold available for transacting inflates slowly over time. Gold did not naturally accumulate in Fort Knox -- it was confiscated by FDR in an idiotic attempt to bail out the banks by devaluing the dollar 40% overnight, which was one of a set of contradictory policies which prolonged the Great Depression. Gold itself is mildly inflationary, but credit created on top of gold supposedly redeemable for gold on demand is bound to eventually deflate though it is also inflationary until it reaches a tipping point of instability. During times of increasing prosperity, the growth in the supply of goods and services available in an economy will outpace the growth in the gold stock, so prices will tend to fall, but this is not deflation in the strictest sense.
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