Quote from: BitPirate on August 07, 2013, 01:08:27 PM

Quote from: bytemaster on August 07, 2013, 04:52:50 AM

4) As a result of 0-3, it follows that prices cannot be calculated at any time because prices are the result of value judgements and there is no means of performing mathematical operations on 'value'. Prices do not define value, values cause prices.

+1 this is the crux of the issue, and was what I was trying to get across before.

Some people say they want a coin with a stable price, but do they, really? What they actually want is a coin that is valued such that they can rely on it's price. That's an altogether different thing.

Something has a reliably stable price over time because people trust and assign a stable value to it.

However the corollary is NOT true. I can try to sell my turds for a fixed price. That in no way makes them valuable. Furthermore, the minute any fools are lured into paying my "stable price" for them, someone else smarter and richer will be able to profit by speculating on their real value.

To me there seem to be problems in the above.

Consider for example a profit-seeking opportunistic merchant or trader, buying and selling any legal and not too massively toxic-to-them goods and/or services whether they value those goods and/or services or not. For some reason or lack of ability to reason, maybe brainwashing, maybe fear of the taxman or fear that the social safety net where they live won't feed clothe and shelter them if they fail to "buy off" those threats in one specific so called "unit of value" those threats foist off upon them: the so called "fiat" that, by fiat of those local threats, is demanded of them where they live.

Prices do define value, certainly as an ordinal/order type of measure and, according to the forensic accountants employed by the gangs/organisations associated with those threats (typically the gang at whose fiat that so called fiat currency is operated / imposed / demanded / required), even as actual "natural numbers", heck nowadays usually even as "real numbers". (Not sure if imaginary numbers work in accounting or finance though, maybe just integers/naturals and reals? or have I simply not noticed or discovered yet some formulas for calculating option prices or something that do actually use square roots and further are also able to work just fine when the values whose roots are taken are negative and furthermore do so by using imaginary numbers instead of by taking the absolute value of the root?)

What I am trying to get at is to a "disinterested merchant", there is no pair in their trades. When they sell you a can of beans they are not trading a can of beans for some "units of value" at all in their own motivational system, they are actually trading you a lower number of those fiat "units of value" for a higher number of those fiat "units of value". The can of beans is just a token, a symbol, a representation, a holodeck hologram on the holodeck known as "the real world", which actually as far as their motivation is concerned, and as far as their general ledger is concerned, and as far as their accounts-payable is concerned, and as far as their accounts-receivable is concerned, is really just "less fiat than the amount of fiat they are selling it to you for".

it is only their inventory system that cares whether it is a can of beans that cost them less than you are offering or a box of detergent that cost them less than you are offering. What it is doesn't matter as long as they bought it for less fiat than you are offering or can restock for less fiat than you are offering or that will cost them less to get rid of than to hold onto.

Does this idea that to them they are not trading a pair make any sense to anyone? is trying to explain their situation as amounting to them not really being engaged in trading a pair with you causing any lightbulb moments for you? You walk into a store looking to do a fiat/beans exchange, but the store is in the business of doing a "less fiat for more fiat" exchange mediated by means of a whole panoply of goods and services that are in a way just hoolodeck objects, symbols, or illusions, just whatever smoke and mirrors it takes to convince you to pay them more fiat for something you see in it than it actually was to their general ledger when they posted it to their inventory ledger (which is just a subledger of their general ledger).

You walk into the shop as an agent of your inventory ledger, looking to pick up some inventory, maybe even some specific type of inventory. They though are there as an agent of their general ledger, unless your choices of which items of inventory you want to buy are able to communicate to them some hint that if they modified some details of their inventory ledger going forward their general ledger might show a higher "bottom line" than it would if they merely restocked whatever items of inventory you buy. (E.G. unless your decisions about what exactly to buy lead them to the idea that selling something other than what they currently sell might increase the amount of fiat they stand to gain from you going forward.)

This whole "unit of value" thing called "money" really distorts perceptions a lot it seems. it usually even causes the fundamental idea that you both profit from your exchange to get screwed around with, making it look, to "general ledgers", as if one of you profited and the other lost!

Seriously! It has such a massive bias about the so called "unit of account" or "unit of value" that you typically end up walking out of the shop with a perishable consumable can of beans that you typically cannot sell for more than you paid it for, thus you made a loss as far as your general ledger would show IF you used the same "units of account" as the shopkeeper instead of exercising your mental freedom to choose to cast your general ledger in terms of cans of beans, or even in terms of happiness, or well-fed-ness, or "utiles" or, in general, something other than the unit of account in which the forensic accountants are going to be taxing the shopkeeper (and maybe you too) in.

By forcing everyone's ledger to be accounted in "money" instead of having it be accounted in totally arbitrary inventory items including such items as happiness, "utiles", well-fed-ness, whatever (arbitrary is really very arbitrary, but using the meaning of arbitrary in which it could be any damned thing or any blessed thing or any thing or experience or state or event rather than the meaning of arbitrary in which fiat is, arbitrarily, the gang whose fiat it is deciding arbitrarily what shall be fiat and what is not [their] fiat), most normal day to day exchanges divide actors into buyers and sellers, instead of keeping it totally clear in the forefront of everyone's mind that both actors are, in buying, actually selling what they are buying with and, in selling, are actually buying what they are selling for.

As soon as we (arbitrarily?) bias the narrative/viewpoint/language/situation into one party selling and the other buying rather than both simultaneously doing both, huge swathes of real social gain. community gain, real ability to get things done gain and so on vanish from foreground-view.

Consider a computer programmer and a carpenter; the programmer has a box of saws and hammers and such, the carpenter has a computer. If they exchanged, their entire community would be better off because two of its members would be equipped with tools they have the skills to use instead of being stuck with a bunch of junk that some other skillset than their own might maybe have some use for but that they themselves cannot really put to use other than as junk to sell to try to raise enough "value" to somehow get closer to having something they actually have the skills to use. Their community had two untooled workers before the exchange and has two tooled workers after the exchange. Both profit and have also created value for their surroundings aka their community also profits!

Introduce fiat into that and all of a sudden it is the tax assessor's assessment of the fiat value of those tools that determines which of the two profits, and the profit is "at the expense of" the other!!!

The "unit of account" or "unit of value" tries to treat a tools/computer exchange as an exchange of one assessed value for another assessed value which might or might not be assessed as numerically the same value. Accounted that way only one of the two can profit: the one that ended up with the higher of the two assessed values.

if the assessment is for tax purposes, and the tax is supposedly paid to the community or society, then the community or society is trying to do this whole shoving of fiat down their throats seemingly for the purpose of extracting from them extra profit over and above the massive gain it is already making by having now two tooled up members instead of two untooled members!

Society is kind of scamming them in a way, trying to extort from them something else despite their having enriched society by causing two of society's members to be better equipped than they had been prior to the trade.

It is some twisted form of myopia or tunnel-vision.

It is why in my Digitalis D'ydii Cluster game I treated the local currency of each world as an intrinsically worthless abstraction, a mere unit of comparison players could choose to use as the unit in which price lists are displayed, a unit that they left behind as a tip to the starport when they flew off to another starsystem with "actual cargo". I let the players pick any item on the price list as the unit in which to display prices, because who the heck cares about the billions of trillions of zillions of local currencies the oodles of starsystems of the swarms of galaxies of the groups of supergroups of galaxies of the clusters and superclusters of galaxies offered as optional units to print/display their local price lists in, what the players really cared about what how much of what they brought with them to that planet it was going to cost them to obtain what they would like to take with them from that planet.

If your cargo holds contain only cans of beans, then you might as well have the price list display the prices of everything else as so many cans of beans. (Another popular unit of account was tons of fuel, since to take anything away from that planet was going to consume fuel...)

It has been decades and still lots of potential-players still don't seem to "get" that money is just another item of inventory, except to those who are brainwashed into thinking the fact lots of folk on the planet they happen to be on tend to use it, rather than cans of beans or tons of fuel or sticks of gum or cones of icecream, as the unit in which to display prices.

I like the argument that value/price must be mutually agreed upon each trade, but I doubt the tax gang will enjoy having to accept whatever you think their services are worth to you instead of what they think their services are worth...

-MarkM-