Quote from: jtimon on September 21, 2011, 07:26:06 AM

I thought you claimed "there's nothing wrong with deflation" too. Sorry, my fault.

By "undeniable truths" I mean premises that are obvious to anyone and that no one will discuss. Logic is part of math, is not a social science.

Logic is logic. Logic involves proofs, but that doesn't make it math. Praxeology involves logic and reason and math, but it's still a social science. The core concept of praxeology, and thus all included disiplines, is the study of human actions. Thus, there is no way to separate the social aspect of the science without significant flaws.

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I agree, I prefer gold over USD. But national inflationary (I prefer this term over fiat because I don't think fiat is bad per se, in fact I consider bitcoin fiat) currencies are not the only alternative.

I can see how you might consider Bitcoin to be similar to fiat currencies, lacking any obvious non-monetary use value; but how could you rationally consider it fiat? The very term requires the imposition of a government agency, since it literally means "by decree".

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I think business cycles are avoidable because I think their root cause is interest.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is wrong. The business cycle's root cause is malinvestment. The social aspect is that, during the boom, investors are as upbeat as everyone else and are more likely to investing borderline projects. Artificially low interest rates, manipulated by central banks, make this pattern of malinvestment worse but are not themselves the cause. The root cause of the boom is a form of collective sentiment, what Keynes called "animal spirits". Keynes was not wrong about the role of the mood of the collective in the business cycle, he was wrong in his belief that it could be forced via monetary policy. The malinvestment of the boom cycle is what then makes the correction inevitable, but there is always a trigger event that draws the attention of the collective towards the developing cracks in the system. Once the first true crack is identified to the collective, it starts looking for more, and it finds them; and then the mood changes. And this continues until the correction resolves the cracks, and the recovery begins. After a time of no cracks, the sentiment slowly turns to a 'feeling' that there are no more cracks to worry about, and the boom starts again. In the past, both a gold standard and the more local regionality of the credit & productive markets tended to limit the scope of the boom, and thus the severity of the bust. The boom from 1992 to 2001 was the longest national (worldwide?) boom period in the history of the US, thus we can expect the most severe correction in the history of the US. But only once those with the power to manipulate monetary and fiscal policies finally resign to allow the correction to occur, or simply fail to continue to prevent it.

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I consider gold and bitcoin flawed because they have interest. I advocate for ripple and freigeld (freicoin if you want to keep the state out of its issuance) and ripple instead. Well, I advocate for bitcoin (it's enough hard to explain it without the demurrage, one step at a time) and I recommend people to buy gold and silver (to protect themselves against what I see as the "unavoidable global fiat system collapse"), but I think they won't be the "money of the future" because of their flaw.

Neither gold nor Bitcoin have interest by their design (or nature). Interest exists only because two parties are willing to engage in contract. Do you believe that there is some mechanism inherent to either Freicoin or Ripple that prohibits interest? Ripple is a web-of-trust credit system, and not a currency at all, so there is certainly not any means to prevent interest contracts from forming in whatever currencies that Ripple users ultimately settle upon using. I admit I'm not terriblely familiar with Freicoin, care to enlighten me?

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I bet you're going to answer with one of these two:

-Without interest people invest in stupid things.
-Demurrage is isomorphic with inflation.

You would have lost that bet in whole. People invest in stupid things because of interest, or more precisely in the pursuit of improbable interest. And I am aware that demurrage is not equal to inflation. Inflation is rot, udderly unavoidable while value is stored in the currency. Demurrage is a security or storage fee, which can usually be reduced under certain situations, which players will then tend to favor. I've started an older thread on this subject, stating my concerns about the lack of an artificail equivialnt to demurrage in Bitcoin, but the thread died because there doesn't seem to be any way to do that in the blockchain security model without also breaking the cash-like features of Bitcoin. It also might not matter, as I'm concerned but not actually convienced that demurrage is neccessary for a cryptocurrency.