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Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

ren.zone

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Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#41

Post by notavalleyman »

ramses0 wrote: post #21
notavalleyman wrote: post #2

> Money, in other words, mostly measures trust. This is less obvious for precious metals or cryptocurrencies because they have an intrinsic value of their own as well Cryptocurrencies have intrinsic value? Did the author intent to write that or was it an accident? S/he has grouped precious metals, which have purposes from engineering to jewellery - with solutions to arbitrary cryptographic problems, which are useless…

Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration, but represents the literal blood, sweat, tears, and toil of someone taking it out of rocks, refining it and putting it into your hands. Also it has some commercial use. Cryptocurrencies likely follow a similar model. Useless to the lay-person except as decoration. Representing a "colossal waste of resources", but having access to the refini…

>to hear your rebuttal

When gold is mined from the ground, planet Earth has less gold.

When a coin is mined, there's a bit less solution space for the class of crypto problem.

But when a Blockchain/protocol is forked, nothing of value is lost. In fact there's a gain in solution space. Eg BCash fork doubled the quantity of BCoin protocol solutions.

> Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration,

And vehicles, phones, computer chips, the industrial applications that keep the planet functioning etc

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#42

Post by kolpa »

kstenerud wrote: post #12

Or, just use IEEE 754 decimal types? That's what they were built for.

That only works if your entire program is in one currency, and you don't use any non-currency integers in your program . The OP is talking about currency conversion and type-safety.

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#43

Post by btilly »

abiox wrote: post #35
RandComment wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inheritance is worthless, then. That's a spurious deduction. Inheritance is a mechanism of passing value store. Purely living off inheritance, reduces the stored value. This is a demonstration of the concept, not a violation.

1) "The value of a currency is the effort required to obtain it" 2) (Inheritance requires no or marginal effort in acquisition) c) "Inheritance is worthless, then."

Modify #1 to "The value of the currency is the average effort required to obtain X in wealth."

That allows us to include inheritance of wealth and finding bags of gold in the street without dismantling our understanding that a given amount of money represents a given amount of effort that we can expect others to be willing to exert to acquire that money from us.

And then walk through a house and look at it not as $X00,000 dollars, but rather as the amount of human work it represents.

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#44

Post by cgb223 »

idbehold wrote: post #4
ucaetano wrote: post #3

> Interestingly, the value of most currencies is measured in terms of the value of other currencies, most of which have no value other than the trust recursively vested in them by civilization. This doesn't make any sense. The value of any currency is measured constantly by its users conducting trades: when you buy a coffee, you're measuring the value of the currency used; when you pay for a haircut, you're measuring…

What is the value of a coffee or haircut? How many coffees is a haircut worth?

If we were using coffee as currency wouldn’t there be an upper limit?

Like if someone gave me 3 coffees I’d be good for the day, but 10 and I’d either be too wired to cut your hair well or drink 3 and watch the other 7 get cold and stale.

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#45

Post by RandComment »

abiox wrote: post #35
RandComment wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inheritance is worthless, then. That's a spurious deduction. Inheritance is a mechanism of passing value store. Purely living off inheritance, reduces the stored value. This is a demonstration of the concept, not a violation.

1) "The value of a currency is the effort required to obtain it" 2) (Inheritance requires no or marginal effort in acquisition) c) "Inheritance is worthless, then."

Currency value isn't dependent on a single entity's experience or the starving man would set food prices. SMH

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#46

Post by kristianp »

smitherfield wrote: post #14

Rational arithmetic is not a good choice for money, since applications that deal with money probably involve user input and so can be trivially DOS-ed. Money should use decimal arithmetic, like COBOL. If it's good enough for banks, it's good enough for you.

How can rationals be DOSd? Sounds interesting.

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#47

Post by lucas_membrane »

> Rational numbers always give precise results, they don't introduce rounding errors and they don't require us to acknowledge a “smallest representable unit”

This is assertion may be invalid when the problem domain includes either (a) compound interest calculations that require calculating a rational number raised to a rational power, (b) expected value calculations with random variables drawn from a probability distribution such as the normal or exponential that is defined using transcendental functions, (c) any formula involving e, pi or the mathematician's favorite, those three little dots ...

For example, the asserted feature of rational arithmetic does nothing for one facing the 6th grade arithmetic problem that introduced us all to the shortcomings of decimal numbers when I went to school: One quart of paint covers 5 square feet; paint costs $2.75 per gallon; how much will it cost to paint a circle 4 yards in diameter?

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#48

Post by smitherfield »

kristianp wrote: post #46
smitherfield wrote: post #14

Rational arithmetic is not a good choice for money, since applications that deal with money probably involve user input and so can be trivially DOS-ed. Money should use decimal arithmetic, like COBOL. If it's good enough for banks, it's good enough for you.

How can rationals be DOSd? Sounds interesting.

By causing them to have very large terms (numerators and denominators).

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#49

Post by notavalleyman »

zenhack wrote: post #26
notavalleyman wrote: post #2

> Money, in other words, mostly measures trust. This is less obvious for precious metals or cryptocurrencies because they have an intrinsic value of their own as well Cryptocurrencies have intrinsic value? Did the author intent to write that or was it an accident? S/he has grouped precious metals, which have purposes from engineering to jewellery - with solutions to arbitrary cryptographic problems, which are useless…

I kinda balked at that too, but I think what the author was getting at is their scarcity is "real", in the sense that unlike fiat currency, there's nobody who can just print more whenever they see fit. I don't really agree with equating scarcity by itself with value, but when comparing to fiat currency, it makes some sense.

> their scarcity is "real"

Then why does every imagined new application of blockchain also create a new coin-type? If someone really does come up with the killer app for blockchain personal banking...well then why would they deploy it on the existant bitcoin network. And the next killer app, and so on. Now everyone is using the killer-app coin, why would bitcoin maintain value, or any of the clones.

Re: Safe-money: Money in the type system where it belongs (2017)

#50

Post by PaulStatezny »

ucaetano wrote: post #40
idbehold wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the value of a coffee or haircut? How many coffees is a haircut worth?

Value is always personal, relative and variable. The value of things can be expressed in terms of any other thing. Right now, in your situation, would you rather have a coffee or a haircut? Would you rather have 2 coffees or 1 haircut? And so on. There are plenty of exercises to determine how you (personally) value things, and also the shape of your utility curve. That was one of the most interesting classes I ever t…

> When you take in account non-linearity of utility curves, lotteries make sense, for example, since for most people the utility of $1 is far less than 1 millionth of the utility of a million dollars.

Can you expand on that? My intuition is telling me that $1 has exactly 1 millionth the utility of a million dollars. I must not understand.

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