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RE: Technology is Poised to Make Moot Many of the Most Contentious Social Issues of our Time

in #technology7 years ago

I see people here talking about blockchain "wealth", but I don't see tangibility. The only thing of real value is precious metals and other tangibles. Blockchain wealth is similar to paper currency in that it is based on confidence and fluctuates. Gold is the standard and everything fluctuates around it including paper currency. An ounce of gold will buy the same tangible asset today that it bought 1000 years ago. In other words a piece of land you bought 1000 years ago for an ounce of gold is the same value today unless there have been value-added improvements to the land or area around it.
One way that governments control populations is to turn off utilities. Water is usually first, but with device addiction the way it is maybe turning off the electricity would bring faster submission.

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Respectfully, you are spouting metal maximalist religious dogma and not anything backed by evidence. It’s just not true that an ounce of gold will purchase the same thing today as $1,000 years ago.

Yes, an ounce of gold would have bought me a fine wool suit in 1995, but it would have bought me a much, much, much finer one (or more than one less fine one) by 2015. The dollar price of fine suits (or clothing in general) barely changed between 1995 and 2015, but the dollar price of gold skyrocketed. Consequently, and once of gold bought me far more suits/clothing in 2015 than 1995. I love gold, but the idea that gold has consistent purchasing power when measured in real world good is just silly. It demonstrably doesn’t.

I respectfully suggest that you don’t understand what blockchains actually are. Blockchains are simply access tokens to open and censorship resistant networks. To say that these networks have no “real value” is either the height of arrogance or naïveté.

Networks in general have a well-known value that can be measured using Metcalfe’s Law (or ideally, one of the more modern and superior variants of it).

Being able to insert information into a publicly available and censorship-resistant blockchain may be one of the most useful (and therefore valuable) things ever invented. In a blockchain world, free speech is not longer just a “legal right”, rather it’s a constant practical capability that can’t be denied. If you see no value in that, then I can’t help you.

If you’re convinced that most of the world’s governments are going to coordinate to implement North Korean levels of control over their populations (for instance, by depriving them of food and/or power), then yah, you may be right. But I think that’s very, very, very unlikely to happen from a game theory perspective.

Thank you for the exchange