Right. Instead of looking for the stats we can't get, we should be looking at the stats we can get and figuring out how we can use them to make something that works better than if we ignored them.
So, really, that's what I'm interested in too. The stats we can get from the block chain aren't exactly the NGDP, or aren't exactly the velocity of money, or whatever, But they are what we can get, and if we're to do any better than we've done they're what we have to start with.
I'm no economist, and I don't know what to assume or do about them, but surely they are related to figures that economists have studied? Maybe not perfectly, but enough for some broad empirical rules under reasonable assumptions about those relationships, about how to respond to them to make things better than they'd be if we simply ignored them?
'Cause if we can't do better than ignoring them what's this conversation about in the first place?
Well, my point was that we don't need any of these statistics. We don't need to know velocity, or NGDP. All we need to observe is the interest rate in a repo market denominated in the cryptocurrency, and you'll get big gains in stability. This doesn't seem too hard to me.
On the other hand, it's really not clear what the results of targeting the total value of all transactions would be. It's not even clear to me that it's possible. For example, you might think that you could just increase the interest rate on the currency when you were above the desired trend, since with higher interest rates on the currency, people have an incentive to hold it rather than making transactions. But if some people in the crypto-economy are more patient than others, then an increase in interest rates will lead to the patient people buying the crypto-coins off the impatient ones, generating additional transactions. Without sitting down and doing the maths I'd find it very hard to say what would happen here, and if I find it hard to predict, the chances are other participants in the market would also find it hard to predict, and you'd get more instability not less.