@urshanabi @natecull Also, looking up futarchy, the idea did indeed have an influence on the design of cryptocurrency.

@urusan @urshanabi

"Proof of stake" seems to me the perfect, crystalline distillation of Capitalism (tm) into its ultimate natural essence:

"My new economic system automatically makes the richest people just automatically get richer and take everyone else's resources forever, end of game, thank you for letting us win".

It is nice to see libertarians saying the quiet part REALLY LOUD, but, I'm not sure what's the attraction of PoS to anyone who's not already a trillionaire.

@natecull @urshanabi Well, it's not so much that Proof of Stake itself is inherently bad, in the same way that markets and currency aren't inherently bad, but rather that present day cryptocurrency has inequality-driving ideological assumptions built-in.

The basic problem is that owners of a lot of crypto can have far more stakes, and thus passively skim money off everyone else, getting richer and richer. So yeah, exactly what you're talking about

@natecull @urshanabi There are two easy solutions though, it's just that they clash with core precepts of cryptocurrency:
1. Introduce deliberate inflation that equals or exceeds what you can get via staking, so people don't want to hold the currency long term. The rich won't get richer because the system is designed to disperse concentrated wealth.
2. Identify users, so you can limit their stake on a per-individual basis.

@urusan @urshanabi

Yep.

Both 1 and 2 sound very much like the ideas the Green Dollars / LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scheme) people came up with.

I almost think it's time for a digital LETS to make a comeback... except that the only time I tried to get involved in a LETS it was a bleak and dispiriting experience because it turns out that if you work fulltime you don't really have much to trade except flea market junk.

@urusan @urshanabi

The whole concept of LETS appeals to me because it's very much "let's keep things small and make sure everyone knows everyone".

But it probably works better with time banking due to tax problems with any cash-convertible barter currency. And again: even time banking has a lot of trust issues. You need a viable, high-trust pre-existing community that has stuff to share and can reciprocate... and those are often likely to be already rich professionals.

@urusan @urshanabi

Oh yeah and also the main LETS server is in South Africa ( https://www.community-exchange.org/ ) , and BY AN INCREDIBLY STRANGE COINCIDENCE, the moment I signed up with a CES account, I began receiving South African spam.

Fortunately there's now an Australian server... maybe that one is more ethical.

https://www.communityexchange.net.au/

@natecull @urshanabi What's time banking?

@urusan @natecull @urshanabi time banking is when human labor is tracked as the currency. you agree to spend some amount of hours for a task and the hours get traded around.

@icedquinn @urusan @natecull @urshanabi note : LETS is inherently limited to a local community. https://villages.io isn't, and is the heir of the LETS idea in practice, globally

@icedquinn @natecull @urshanabi @urusan though in this context: it *doesn't* require strong identity and so isn't really a way around proof of stake.

@urusan @urshanabi

Time banking is a local barter system like LETS except that the unit of exchange is "hours of labour", so it's not directly convertible into cash.

A community organization can create one, then people can sign up and exchange hours by doing work for each other.

Of course most of that work will be unskilled, so... that's why you need high trust. But community orgs often attract low-trust people. Lots of safety issues to work out.

https://timebanks.org/

@urusan @urshanabi

There is an active time bank in my neighbourhood, and I go to a church that hosted and overlaps with the community group that runs the time bank, and I still don't really know enough of the people in the time bank to really trust them to come into my house.

I still think it's a great idea. But I haven't yet managed to make it work for me. So my feelings are complicated.

@urusan @urshanabi

Still, imagine if some bright young things with a neo-socialist bent decided to pool their funds and set up a shared living situation... that might be the sort of environment where time banking and/or LETS comes into its own.

There's got to be a roughly equal amount of skilled hours or goods to trade, and some really committed people, to start with. In that situation, and with decentralised tech, there could be some real wins.

@natecull @urshanabi I don't think any amount of fancy trust-ensuring cryptographic algorithms will solve the "can I trust these people in my house?" problem. :-P

@urusan @urshanabi

That's right, it won't.

Of course our church itself runs on a roster, which is another way of making things work. Not every form of organised resource/labour sharing has to be a currency or market.

@natecull @urusan @urshanabi part of the reason why is that you aren't gaining the rippling that villages allows. You aren't facilitating transactions using the social capital you've built. It lowers the amount of skilled hours and goods to trade necessary to get out of the dual incidence of wants problem a lot.