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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: John Nash created bitcoin
by
dinofelis
on 13/04/2017, 11:39:07 UTC
You are mistaken. By the time Bitcoin reaches its intended use case phase after the global monetary reset 2024ish, Bitcoin's debasement will be winding down.

I don't believe in that "monetary reset".  There will be financial crises, as there always have been.  No big deal.  Crypto won't help.

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Also you are causing confusion with your incorrect use of the term deflation. Deflation is an economy-wide phenomenon so would only apply if Bitcoin was the unit-of-account widely employed in the economy. Although it is true that in a few more years, Bitcoin will be causing massive global deflation.

I use deflation simply in terms of "monetary unit acquires value".  

From wiki:
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In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services.[1] Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0% (a negative inflation rate). Inflation reduces the real value of money over time; conversely, deflation increases the real value of money – the currency of a national or regional economy. This allows one to buy more goods and services than before with the same amount of money.

When a monetary unit acquires value, there is deflation of that monetary unit.

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Also Nash specifically wrote that debasement was compatible with his ideal money, as long as the schedule of debasement was non-manipulable (which is the case for Bitcoin).

You can't have it both ways.  You can't require the ideal money unit to keep a stable value (with respect to a large basket) and have its debasement *numerically* specified in advance.  What you can do, is to have strict target rules for debasement to act to reach an inflation target.  In as much as these rules are immutable, they are non-manipulable.

This is why Nash thought of the Euro as close to an asymptotic ideal money:
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John Nash mentioned in his lecture that Euro might become an ideal money in the future, because Euro is used in a large range of places and has a good stability. It is the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union and is the official currency of the eurozone which consists of 18 of the 28 member states of the European Union. In general, Euro has a macroeconomic stability, people in Europe owning large amounts of euros are "served by high stability and low inflation." Moreover, in March 2014, Euro was commented as "an island of stability" by the head of the European Central Bank.

(from the wiki on ideal money).

So, the "schedule of debasement" as a non-manipulable rule to reach the inflation target, yes.  A pre-programmed, blind, debasement scheme: obviously not, because otherwise, the introduced inelasticity cannot guarantee price stability or price inflation stability, which is the defining characteristic of ideal money.  

It is why gold is not a possible ideal money:
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The gold does not reach the standard of ideal money, despite its merits. The main problem is because the silver and gold do not have a constant value all the time. "To the undiscerning minds of the mass of men a pound sterling of gold, a silver five-franc piece, or a paper dollar, represents always a definite unit. It has not escaped attention, however, that a given amount of money buys much less at one time than another."

exactly because one cannot apply a debasement (or destruction) to keep its value constant.

This is the other reason why I don't think it was Nash that created bitcoin: the economic model of ideal money of his hand, would never go for a collectible with DIMINISHING emission.  At best, Nash would have built in an emission curve that would follow predicted adoption (which is essentially impossible in advance): few emission in the beginning, and issuing MORE AND MORE bitcoins as time advances, so as to keep the price of bitcoin constant with growing adoption.

In fact, there would have been a way to do so: instead of increasing difficulty to have constant (and 4-year stepwise decreasing) emission rate, have constant difficulty, compensated by Moore's law.  As such, the price of a bitcoin would more or less remain constant, and equal the cost of the work spent on making them.  You would accept bitcoins against value if it would cost you more to make them, and you would make bitcoins if it would cost you less making them than buying them.

PoW at constant work cost, was a way to implement something much closer to ideal money, than bitcoin's sound money doctrine.