Bitcoin is not a currency. Very few people, from Nobel Prize Winning economists to the "man on the street" understand money and value. The phenomenon of cryptocurrency is a case in point. I highly recommend the little horror story of Gerald Cotton and Quadriga as background to my comments here. Not wanting to trust their money with any "central authority", Quadriga's customers handed over their life savings to a trusted criminal and they vanished with him when he died. Marketplaces in of any scale require an underlying currency to function. At the very least, such currency must have a more or less stable value on the day the market takes place. In practice, such currencies become stable in larger territories over longer time periods, usually backed by the agreed-to value of some particular good, such as gold or silver or the promise to pay gold or silver. Unlike in the imagination of crypto believers, the "government" is just another play...
In Alien 1979, we were introduced to a creature that invades its host and connects itself so deeply to the host's internal organs that removal of the invader will kill the victim. When religion is installed in the mind of a baby and left to grow for years, disentanglement seems close to psychological suicide. The human "self" is so entangled with the invader that survival without the resident alien seems impossible. In fact, the invader has become the "self". The alien egg is planted soon after birth. The victim is raised in a deeply religious household that is itself part of a religious culture. Inside the bubble, the fantasy is daily reality. This is particularly insidious for women, who may find themselves mothers in their early teens, saddled with caring for (and infecting) families of their own long before they develop brains that are capable of "pushing back" against bubble-think. Religion tends to be "hard wired" into generations of wo...
I'm a career computer systems analyst, with a special love for "OOA-object-oriented analysis". OOA is particularly attractive since it comes very close to the way we think in a categorical way. After reading a few books on the economy, especially the " Value of Everything ". Here are some of the key objects in this model: Resources, such as corn, fish, wood, fuel. Each of these resources has its own profile as to how much "work" is required to obtain the resource, how much is available etc. The Market. This turned out to be the most complex thing to specify. How do you model trades between people? This question is at the heart of economic theory, such as, How does money evolve? The Person. Resources are owned and consumed by persons. To make the model work, we'd need thousands of these persons with different "policies" regarding consumption and trade. The environment. This object "owns" resources, but also knows about th...
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