A few thoughts about money as a groundwork for upcoming(?) posts.

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)

Hey there stranger!

I thought I'd gather here a few of my posts on other social media sites, like Twitter, Gab and Minds. You'll find most of what I write here from those platforms as well, in their own form suitable for the platform in question.

For the last few years I have given a lot of thought on the nature of money and I see no end to this as of yet. I continuously read about the topic, I'm constantly trying to accumulate knowledge on economics in general but also on the philosophical questions about 'money' and 'value' etc. I've posted that one of my latest "revelations" is coming up with an answer to the question "what is money" as follows: 


"money is an abstraction;  it's a unit of measurement accepted and agreed upon widely." 


After conjuring this and upon following my social media feeds in general I came up with as of yet not very robustly formulated ideas;

I think that Bitcoin is essentially an extension of a few very solid, old and familiar but rather abstract ideas. As I eluded to in one of my previous posts, money is an abstraction when stripped to its philosophical building blocks - basically answering the question "what is money" - and this new form of money ( #Bitcoin ) utilizes ideas like non-trust, transparency and (albeit poorly) anonymity.
It's hard to put to words how exactly, but I tend to think these "values" (another word could just as easily be "mechanisms") in the same vein as freedom of speech, and in addition, to me at least, these all connect neatly. The reason why, for example Bitcoin, "just works" is precisely because it uses all these quite fundamental mechanisms to function. It's in the code. It's in the network. It's immutable. What I'm saying is that it is really hard, if not impossible, to bring these mechanisms into question, and therefore cryptocurrencies are giving fiats a proper beating.
What I think we can really learn from this in a cypherpunk-esque spirit, that incorporating anonymity to the list of these fundamental values will eventually lead us to a better future.

I'm obviously going to need to give a lot more thought on how to formulate this, but if you grasp the basic idea of what I'm arguing here I'm very happy. This has a lot more to do with the general atmosphere surrounding public discourse about humanity's collective future than it has with plain economics, or rather the mechanisms with which economics these days operate. If you're curious to know my stance on these smaller topics I'd recommend finding out about movements like "Positive Money" and "Rethinking Economics" (the latter have a book called "Econocracy" which I'm still in the process of reading, but solely based on that I'd highly recommend it!).

"econocracy (e·con·oc·ra·cy) n. A society in which political goals are defined in terms of their effect on the economy, which is believed to be a distinct system with its own logic that requires experts to manage it."


So yeah, I guess this serves both as a taster for what to expect from me and as a spark for some conversation so I could learn even more. Thank you for taking the time to read this, have a nice day!

PS. Now that I'm about to click that post-button I'd like to note that I am not at all sure how this is going to look, my editing skills are quite sub-par on this platform. So in case it's all total crap, just know that I'll try to improve in the future. Also if you have feedback for me on my language I'd appreciate it, English is not my native tongue :)

multiple edits: yeah, I found the edit button. Doesn't change the fact that this post is still ugly XD

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