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Musings Report 2017:41 10-14-17 What I'm Grateful For
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
What I'm Grateful For
The deluge of recent disasters invites the emotions of sorrow for those who lost their lives, family members, homes and possessions, and "there but for the grace of God go I" gratitude for an uneventful life.
But beyond the gratitude for an unharrowing life, I've been mulling the very long list of things I'm grateful for, starting with all the abilities the young take for granted: the ability to walk with ease, to sleep deeply, to eat whatever we desire (in modest quantities, of course), and to see, hear, taste, touch and smell the world around us with unimpeded ease.
I have also been mulling my brother-in-law Fred's expressions of gratitude for being free of pain, despite battling an aggressive cancer for the past 18 months. To be free of pain is undoubtedly one of the greatest sources of gratitude, for pain saps our ability to enjoy anything in life.
Beyond these physical-world sources of gratitude, I am grateful for the steadfast support of my work by an astonishingly varied and savvy circle of contributors, and for the even wider community of readers of my work who have generated a kind of 'network effect' by distributing my essays and books to their own networks.
The readers and contributors to Of Two Minds are always ahead of me; you clue me into new technologies and new dynamics, and your critiques and suggestions have sharpened my own thinking immensely.
From you, I have learned that there are solutions out there, ready for distribution to a wider audience, and a great many people with profoundly practical experience and deep reservoirs of good will.
I am generally slow on the uptake. I remember readers asking if I'd heard about bitcoin in 2010, shortly after its emergence. Just last year, a kindly reader pointed me to Ethereum, when it was $8 per token. I looked into it, and decided it was certainly worthy of exploration, and that I'd buy some soon. Alas, now it is $340 per token.
We can never really know how lucky we are, but we can make an attempt to draw the outlines of our good fortune. To be born in this place and this time, where anyone with an Internet or mobile-phone connection has the means to put their ideas out into the world--this is an extraordinary piece of good fortune.
I don't know what to attribute the growth of the Of Two Minds community to, and I shy away from even trying lest I disrupt the magic, but I think it might have something to do with our shared enthusiasm for new ideas, new insights, and new solutions--or old solutions re-applied to the present.
Thank you for being a contributor to this small but amazing network of smart, resourceful, caring and generous people.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
The Endgame of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization 10/13/17
Are You Better Off Than You Were 17 Years Ago? 10/12/17
About Those "Hedonic Adjustments" to Inflation: Ignoring the Systemic Decline in Quality, Utility, Durability and Service 10/11/
Our Protected, Predatory Oligarchy: Dirty Secrets, Dirty Lies 10/10/17
The Consent of the Conned 10/9/17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Our friends in Sonoma County (Sebastopol) avoided the destruction wreaked by the wild fires that raged within a few miles of their house.
Market Musings: Is Bitcoin a "Real Currency"?
Even those with little interest in cryptocurrencies are probably aware that one camp dismisses the blockchain-based currencies as fads, frauds or bubbles, while another camp views them as the trillion-dollar economy of the future.
One thing we know for sure: the two camps can't both be right. Only one will be right, the other will be wrong.
Much of the confusion, in my view, boils down to this question: is bitcoin (the leading blockchain-based cryptocurrency) a "real currency", functionally equivalent to government-issued currencies such as the ruble, yuan, yen, peso, etc., or is it a pretender, i.e. not a "real currency"?
Detractors naturally say it isn't a real currency. Supporters say it is.
Professor Bernard Lietaer, one of the co-designers of the euro, defined money "as an agreement, within a community, to use something as a medium of exchange... Any monetary agreement is only valid within a given community".
Given that we assume all currencies must be global to be "real currencies," this is a peculiar definition of money. Yet it aligns with the core insight into the nature of money/currency, which is that it is a social construct.
If we accept Lietaer's definition, then bitcoin is a "real currency" as it is accepted as a medium of exchange within a community.
It seems to me that the key characteristic of "real currencies" is that they are convertible to other currencies; that is, members of the peso community (for example) can move their money into the community of dollar-users.
Some critics claim that bitcoin isn't a "real currency" because you can't spend them freely to buy goods and services. I think this misses the core dynamic of currencies, which is their convertibility.
If bitcoin can be converted to US dollars, and the dollars can be used to buy goods and services, then bitcoin is obviously exchangeable for goods and services through an intermediary currency.
Other critics claim the bitcoin isn't a "real currency" because it isn't backed by anything real such as gold--or in the case of fiat currencies issued by governments, the states' ability to tax national economies, a function that is presumed to support national currencies.
But if we look at Venezuela, the Venezuelan government certainly has the ability to collect taxes, but that hasn't saved the nation's currency, the Bolivar, from near-complete collapse.
It seems that demand for currency is the primary dynamic of qualifying as a store of value, and the demand for bitcoin is based on its scarcity value: only 21 million bitcoins will be issued.
As inflation picks up and trust in competing currencies decays, bitcoin's scarcity value may become more important than its utility as a means of exchange.
From Left Field
'Worse Than Big Tobacco': How Big Pharma Fuels the Opioid Epidemic
HOW FACEBOOK REWARDS POLARIZING POLITICAL ADS (via GFB)
What Facebook Did to American Democracy He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an 'information fiduciary,' charged with certain special roles and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data.
What’s crucial to understand is that, from the FB system’s perspective, success is correctly predicting what you’ll like, comment on, or share. That’s what matters. People call this "engagement."
How to Wipe Out Puerto Rico’s Debt Without Hurting Bondholders (via LaserLefty)
First Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society (via Maoxian)
But real social networks are not like either of these models. Instead, people are strongly connected to a relatively small group of neighbors and loosely connected to much more distant people.
These loose connections turn out to be extremely important. “Those weak ties serve as bridges between our group of close friends and other clustered groups, allowing us to connect to the global community."
Meanwhile, research into the strength of marriage has found some evidence that married couples who meet online have lower rates of marital breakup than those who meet traditionally. That has the potential to significantly benefit society. And it’s exactly what Ortega and Hergovich’s model predicts.
Why are more american teenagers than ever suffering from severe anxiety?
The bubble economy is set to burst, and US elections may well be the trigger--important essay by Andy Xie....
English Foundations of US Administrative Law: Four Central Errors -- DBI:dull but important... I think the author missed the critical distinction between "illegal" and "unjust"....
Ralph Nader: How CEO Stock Buybacks Parasitize the Economy
Hyper enrichment of a handful of radical corporate state supremacists wasn’t what classical capitalism was supposed to be about.
A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world (via Benedict Evans) -- utterly fascinating depiction of ancient-world trading routes....
"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." Marcus Aurelius
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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