Quote from: Clark on October 03, 2018, 03:14:42 PM

Quote from: Hydrogen on October 03, 2018, 01:21:01 PM

An offworld currency system may need to be flexible to adapt to unforeseen or shifting economic & financial conditions which could rule out bitcoin with its rigid algorithmically determined supply.

I would argue the opposite: meddling with the money supply often causes more problems than the original crisis. As long as it's divisible, any quantity of money is enough for an economy. Long article here if you're curious.

I agree to a point. It depends upon public consciousness/awareness/education/information. In a society where people are educated enough to know when and why rates should be raised/lowered or the money supply should be increased/tightened there can be advantages to currencies which are flexible. The trouble with the current era is virtually no one knows enough to comprehend the implications of current monetary policy which makes it easy for scales to be tipped in favor of certain demographics. Under these circumstances algorithmic based supply can be far superior. The reason for their better performance is a substitute for the general public having a good working education and knowledge of topics like economics/business/finance.

For a small colony, flexibility could be a key advantage. There may not be the massive divide we find in nations of millions of people which complicate financial or economic policy. Its hard for me to think of a good example for this. Imagine if people on a mars colony are paid on fridays in bitcoin. Let's say that something happened. Their btc paychecks were stored on a crypto exchange that was hacked & all the funds were stolen. This delayed them being paid. Under a flexible system they could simply issue new coins to pay themselves on schedule.

Of course due to electronics needing to be hardened against radiation and EM interference they might not achieve a high enough CPU frequency necessary to do well processing electronic transactions. I seem to remember people making fun of the mars rovers electronics in terms of how inferior it was to phones they carried in their back pocket. Hardening against interference takes a high toll, etc.

Anyways sorry to bother you with pointlessness, this is like one of the few interesting threads I've seen recently so had to spam it.

Quote from: Parodium on October 03, 2018, 06:33:37 PM

The need for currency becomes pretty much nil when everybody has machines that can literally rearrange atoms into whatever they want. That is the truth of the distant future, nanoscale micro-assemblers, the end of patents, the end of currency, the end of trade entirely.

A machine like that could theoretically be built. There's nothing that says it wouldn't be the size of the large hadron collider and require terawatts of electricity to produce 0.0005 grams of material, making it too inefficient for use.

I think that is something people believe in to worry less about what happens to civilization when oil or other resources are depleted.