Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

Sure you can. It's code, why wouldn't you be able to change it?

There is no reason that cryptocurrency has to be inherently deflationary, rewards can easily be issued at a constant rate or any other rate. You are mixing up Bitcoin, the libertarian implementation, with the abstract cryptocurrency in general. This is an implementation detail.

In fact, there is actually already a rather storied history of centralized interventions to bail out failing institutions. See: the DAO hack and the subsequent rollback...

Could Vitalik just as easily have said "JP Morgan now has +5 million Eth?" Absolutely.

Nobody else necessarily needs to accept that version of the blockchain (see: Ethereum Classic) but there is a network effect here: if everyone else agrees to accept that version of history then sucks to be you, everyone wants to deal with Eth not PaulCoins. And people tend not to be willing to accept calamity when offered an alternative. Ethereum Classic is the version of history which best upholds those high-minded libertarian ideals, but it's also the version of history where a single attacker has 15% of all the ether.

What we really got was a tacit approval for bankers that they could make highly leveraged bets in the 7 years that the markets were going up, make shitloads of money, feel like geniuses, and then when it all inevitably explodes the government would bail them out and then QE like crazy to pick up the pieces. The QE would be given not to citizens, but to banks to inflate equity markets, and start the whole cycle again.

Now we have a whole new generation of financial "geniuses" overhyping every asset class, making shitloads of money off it all, thinking they are geniuses, and when it all collapses again they think the same thing will happen. It may do, but this time I don't have to be involved in that bullshit. My money is now unprintable. They can devalue the USD shitcoin all they want, but there are still only 21 million possible bitcoins and that's all I care about.

People will still invest, but risk tolerance goes way down and ROI expectations go way up.

Concretely, your business plan has to compete with "I can get an x% return by putting my money under my pillow", and x becomes very large in a highly deflationary economy. Place yourself in the shoes of a person seeking investment in a productive business, and the problems with a deflationary economy become obvious. Being good isn't enough. You have to be better than "sit on my ass and get rich doing nothing".

In other words, the primary concern in a deflationary economy is discouraging value-producing economic activity.

Also, all of this is wrt deflation in general. Notice that a fiat currency can easily be deflationary. The deflationary nature of gold standards is a major component of the criticism of gold standards, but there are also other reasons that people oppose gold standards.

> Same can also be said about spending. As a contemporary example why would anyone buy a computer today when they know that in the near future they can get a better model for less? The whole computer industry thrives in a price deflationary sector of the economy.

People still buy computers because having a computer today helps capture value that you can't capture by having a better computer tomorrow. For consumers, entertainment tonight. For businesses, automating processes today.

> Whenever someone is trying to push one economic theory over another the key question you need to ask is cui bono.

That's not quite fair. There are people motivated by truth and there are also people motivated by ideology.

Money is useful, because it solves for the 'n' of a given trade by using all the pricing of transactions as a form of parallel computation, so the fact that it may often give sub-optimal results is outweighed by the fact that it has such a low overhead, compared to the traditional alternatives, such as planned resource based economies, which have historically been plagued by both sub-optimal results and a very high overhead.

The revolutionary work in economics isn't being done on the blockchain, or in any other new currencies for that matter. It is being done in the world of AI and big-data, when applied to logistics.

If you really want to revolutionise money, you have to try and make it obsolete.

edit: Also, seeking sources of funding may be problematic for such an enterprise - "Please can you invest in this plan to destroy capitalism." - being a particularly difficult sell.

Perhaps if it can be reframed as - "Please can you invest in this plan to destroy capitalism that also has excellent quarterly returns." - then it might get somewhere.