You would get absolutely slaughtered in a public market setting if this happened -- I love the idea of ICOs giving non-accredited investors the ability to invest in risky ventures, but you have to wonder about the diligence layer that comes with it, especially as organizations like Bancor do not have nearly the legal requirements for transparency.
Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are referring to Bretton-Woods Conference, it is not obscure at all. It is probably the most important monetary event in modern history and probably everyone with economics background knows about it. Also it was during WWII. But you are right that parts of it (like the international clearing union and its implications) are just mentioned in passing in economic courses and rarely acknowledged nowadays.
It's only my faint impression, but I think there's some renewed interest in some sort of international financial / monetary framework similar to Bretton-Woods. The governor of the Chinese central bank publicly expressed interest (and explicitly invoked Bretton-Woods) a few months ago. And other 'mainstream' central banking authorities seem to be acknowledging that there are big deficiencies with the current model (e.…
There was some noise about bringing about a world reserve currency in the years after 2008 but not much came of it. There was a big increase of the SDR allotments to handle the bailouts that were expected immediately after the crisis. And Chinese currency is now part of the SDR basket. But I don't think a world currency outside of US control will be allowed to exist.
Also Keynes' ideas on handling imbalances goes in the face of what politicians have been saying for decades: "Deficits are bad, and surpluses are good." So neither the public nor the politicians are ready to even acknowledge that there might be problems with this logic.
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#43> Our thinking here is that people invented money to solve the [Double coincidence of Wants] problem in barter, making trade asynchronous, more efficient and predictable. Fun fact, that's not true! It's called "the barter myth", and was put forward by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. But anthropologists everywhere have looked for 'pre-money' societies in their field research and haven't really found any. Barterin…
I wouldn't entirely trust that book - I've heard that Graeber plays fast and loose with the facts. (I have no expertise on the economics side of things, but I did notice that his quotation of Tyndale's translation of the lord's prayer does not match what I've seen elsewhere)
The details are notoriously weak[1] and it doesn't entirely shy away from imposing Graeber's view that debt is always and everywhere a bad thing, but the actual core argument that money tended to arise as a means of recording debt settlements rather than a veil over barter is a reasonably well supported one.
[1]There are long lists of mostly-trivial stuff various bloggers have pointed out Graeber got obviously wrong, which afaik don't include the apparent Tyndale translation error you've spotted or the claim that Keynes' Treatise on Money was his most famous work that stuck out like a sore thumb to me...
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a general rule, economists tend to look at theoretical models of how systems are supposed to work and whether those assumptions fit the data and economic historians tend to look at why policies were introduced or recommended and what their proponents and detractors thought about then. They do tend to share departments, students and reading lists though.
That would appear to be like someone coming up with a theory of the movement of sailing boats without accounting for the weather! :-)
That's economics for you. That's why I switched fields some time ago. It is a "science" that consistently gives flawed predictions and it's is often used to provide cover for political ideologies.
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a general rule, economists tend to look at theoretical models of how systems are supposed to work and whether those assumptions fit the data and economic historians tend to look at why policies were introduced or recommended and what their proponents and detractors thought about then. They do tend to share departments, students and reading lists though.
That would appear to be like someone coming up with a theory of the movement of sailing boats without accounting for the weather! :-)
Or evaluating code without intimate familiarity with the internal politics of the dev team that wrote it :-)
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't the whole Incan Empire money-free?
Yep. I think the point that Graeber made in his "Debt" book was that non-monetary debt came first, before money or even barter. The Inca system of communal labour could be seen as being based on a debt of work owed to the community.
In that case, could one not also argue that the pope shitting in the woods is simply the pope repaying the food debt he took on by nature?
Not everything is debt. I mean, debt may be the cornerstone of our current financial system, but that doesn't mean it always was so. This just seems like grasping at straws to fit the argument.
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#47Well they should learn though: - Their clients tell them the message is not clear so they make a video. - "Bancor is Flawed" says too many buzzwords make it unclear and fluffy. - You have to Google to understand the words according to Bancor themselves. - They even have to add parenthesis in this article to explain some words! But they still think their message is clear. While I have no idea about this world, I do ca…
The best book for explaining your product idea is "Made to Stick" [1]. It has a great process for breaking your idea down in the most concrete terms and has some useful tools such as analogy to a similar product ("like dropbox for x").
The cliche adage here is that "if you can't explain your product in one or two sentences then I'm not interested". This is why the "Hollywood pitch" developed organically because people love to overcomplicate everything. VCs look for this as well.
This is why PhDs such as the author make bad people for communicating products. They love abstract terms and advanced hand wavy generalizations. Same with how corporate marketing people are similarily bad because they love buzz words and trends.
Ethereum is full of these companies that are hyper complex and I'm convinced that it's correlated to the number of academics behind all of them. They all have great website designs, they should spend similar time and money on good copywriting - which starts with the founders understanding their own product/service.
They all have a problem with communicating anything of substance. Ethereum has the same problem.
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#48You would get absolutely slaughtered in a public market setting if this happened -- I love the idea of ICOs giving non-accredited investors the ability to invest in risky ventures, but you have to wonder about the diligence layer that comes with it, especially as organizations like Bancor do not have nearly the legal requirements for transparency.
Meh, I say let the fools spend their money however they want. Soon they'll understand why there are restrictions on investing in areas like this
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I think the point that Graeber made in his "Debt" book was that non-monetary debt came first, before money or even barter. The Inca system of communal labour could be seen as being based on a debt of work owed to the community.
In that case, could one not also argue that the pope shitting in the woods is simply the pope repaying the food debt he took on by nature? Not everything is debt. I mean, debt may be the cornerstone of our current financial system, but that doesn't mean it always was so. This just seems like grasping at straws to fit the argument.
> In that case, could one not also argue that the pope shitting in the woods is simply the pope repaying the food debt he took on by nature?
Well the validity of that comparison would be whether the woods would be annoyed if the pope shat somewhere else.
Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”
#50> Every buy and sell order is an (arguably superior) source of knowledge as to what is happening in the real world.
If they replaced (arguably superior) with (real if possibly flawed) I might be tempted to take them seriously. But this belief in perfectly efficient market is hilarious, especially in the face of all the people getting rich out of market inefficiencies...