my man this is epic. I've been lurk-reading since you came back online and I have to say.... the depth, breadth and ... well ... all of it. It's nothing short of great. I'm subbing.
I'm still trying to figure out how even with Wall Street-sponsored sabotage, ConTracked wouldn't be way, way superior to the current government contract and acquisitions system.
I mean, hedge funds gonna hedge fund, right? So you'll have some that short the ConTracked and hire saboteurs to blow up the bridges, but others will go long the ConTracked derivative instrument and pay for security and help with financials and such... Sounds perfectly feasible.
In the normal functioning of American democracy, half of the government is interested in sabotaging the projects of the other half. A successful project will be optimized to be difficult to sabotage: "His financial system is a work of genius. I couldn't undo it if I tried. And I tried." -- Thomas Jefferson
The key advantage of ConTracked is just that the winning bid for the contract needs to put up a deposit that is forfeited if the bridge doesn't get built, right?
Modulo deposits, it looks like buying a billion CT for $X is equivalent to winning a contract to build the bridge for ($1 billion - X), and selling your billion CT is equivalent to subcontracting someone else to build it for you, and the fact that we have a billion tokens worth $1 rather than one token worth $1B is just to encourage gambling?
I think the benefit is that it simplifies accounting for the government. With ConTracked, the only thing they have to care about is whether the bridge meets the specs. It does? Flip a switch and ConTracked coins are now worth money - whatever companies were responsible for building it get whatever the money they agreed between themselves. It doesn't? Ain't bad either, the government can try again, and they're ahead $X.
The only thing I'm unclear on is where does the money come from when the switch is flicked. Turning $0 of coins into $1B of coins sounds like printing $1B out of thin air, which is presumably Not Good.
It's not printing money, it's just spending it. If the bridge is built, the government owes 1 billion dollars, otherwise owes zero.
The government *can* print money to pay that debt, just like they could for anything they spend money on, but it doesn't have to. It could just be a line in the budget - "1 billion dollars for the bridge if the ConTrack resolves."
If you want to be really confident that the government isn't going to print money, you could make them put the money in escrow when the coins are created, and then the money either goes to the coin owner or back to the government depending on if the bridge was built.
Your company/companies build a bridge. They are NOT going to wait for payment depending on "does it meet specs?". They are NOT going to take on a contract that says "you go ahead and sink all this money and time and resources into building a bridge but we reserve the right at the last minute to go 'nah we don't like it' and pay you nothing". Taking on a government contract means they EXPECT to be paid at least something.
Also, if they build a crummy bridge, what happens next? Do you get them to tear it down? Who builds a new one? Do you get the new bidder to repair the crummy bridge? What about all the people seething over the disruption that "great, for the past eighteen months I've had to divert to a secondary road, now they can't even manage to get the damn thing right on the first try"?
The original story seems fairly clear that the government defines the required specs in advance and a neutral party determines whether they have been met. One could perhaps argue this can't be done for some reason, but complaints of yanking payment after the bridge is built are attacking a straw man.
And obviously companies would *prefer* to be paid sooner and follow laxer rules. But are you really arguing that there is *no one in the world* who would pick up a $1B contract to build a bridge if the only way to get it was to agree to tighter rules and a later payment? Even if they can charge more for that, because they aren't bidding against anyone who would get better terms?
If they build a crummy bridge, then presumably whoever buys the next round of ConTracked gets to deal with it however they want (as long as we end up with a spec-meeting bridge at the end), and the costs of whatever they plan to do are already built into their bid. It sucks in terms of timeline, but how is that any worse than if someone builds a crummy bridge NOW, under the current rules?
The government absolutely will change the specs while the bridge is under construction. That's a given - the specifications are the result of politics, and politics doesn't stop happening juts because someone broke ground on a new bridge. The current rules allow for this, and the contract is renegotiated whenever the government changes its mind. There's always some amount of money that will convince the contractor to build to the new specifications rather than continue under the original contract.
But with ConTracked, I don't see how you conduct that negotiation. If there were only one contractor involved, sure, you could issue $1.2B of Bridge 2.0 coins contingent on building the bridge to the new specs and *not* claiming the $1B contract on Bridge 1.0. With multiple contractors in the game, either there's a chance that the government gets stuck paying for an unwanted bridge, or a chance that the contractor sinks half a gigabuck into a bridge only to find that the rules have changed in a way that ensures their competitor gets the payoff. Or both.
Isn't that one of the advantages of the ConTracked system? A government procurement system that can't have the cost go up because politicians are playing games sounds like a good thing.
I suspect the main issue in practice would be that the contractor has to pay for everything upfront and they likely don't have that much cash on hand. Even if I think I can build the bridge for only half a billion dollars, which would make me a hefty profit, where am I gonna *get* half a billion?
That's a pretty big amount for a private lender.
A normal contractor would invoice you over time for the work they've done, so they don't need to float that much money. But you can't issue a ConTrack in installments - you might end up paying for a half-finished bridge.
(Or can you? Maybe you could make the ConTrack value be proportional to what % of the bridge has been constructed? But it would be hard to judge.)
I am sincerely curious, since I've had some small experience in Buying Stuff Under Government Procurement Rules, how this would work out.
I like that everyone is throwing around figures such as "so the government wants you to build a bridge for $1 billion". NO, THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T. The bridge may *end up* costing $1 billion, but that's due to Finagle's Law ("everything takes longer. and costs more.")
What the government wants is "We put the bridge building out to tender. We want as many tenders as we can get so we can get the cheapest price, because this is Your Tax Dollars At Work and votes depend on this - votes! to keep us in power and in our jobs! and the opposition party/parties will be watching like hawks to attack us for overspending! also we of course want to avoid bribery and corruption and Senator Smith's cousin's brother-in-law getting a fat contract due to kickbacks but ahem okay what is important here are the VOTES! and maybe yeah replacing the old bridge what fell down in the last storm".
So depending on the size of the project, the level of complexity (there may well only be one company capable of handling this), how much money the contractors perceive to be sloshing around, etc. you put this up on Eurotender (https://eurotender.de/index.php/en/tenders) and/or eTenders (https://www.etenders.gov.ie/) and wait for the bids to come in.
Some of them will be plainly chancing their arms and you know they have no hope of taking on a job of this scale. Some of them *will* be Senator Smith's cousin's brother-in-law. Hopefully you end up with at least three (that being the minimum number) that are reasonably priced for the job and able to do it.
Then the fun begins.
So yeah, I can think of many ways ConTracked would go horribly wrong (as mentioned, bidding on the job then selling on the contract and that being sold on etc. down the line until the last person holding the bag is the one company you did *not* want doing the job). I'd love to know how it would work, but I'm crying (tears of laughter) at the idea that it's as simple as "let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer". The BIG attraction of bidding on a government contract is that you, the buyer, want to make it as risk-free as possible so you write it into the contract that "even if the bridge blows up and falls down the Tuesday after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, we still get paid and have no legal liability. Just take the cost out of the taxes, everyone knows government has all this money sloshing around!"
I agree that it is not unlikely to go horribly wrong, but If Senator Smith's relative has to bid on the contract, is that not acceptable? He has to find a patsy, at least, to put inthe down payment.
And if the crap company gets all the crypto, and can't build the bridge properly, the government will screw them over.
Of course, the sheer risk inherent in this enterprise means that bids for government contract crypto are probably not going to be very high, and people will demand extra contract crypto to cover risk. You may not end up saving much money.
It sounds a bit like Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts, which aren't vulnerable to sabotage. And there's no interest in them for reasons Robin Hanson discusses in "Elephant in the Brain" (short version: hardly anyone cares about reforming the system to improve anything).
Even without shorting/betting against completion, it occurs to me there is another angle to incentivize sabotage. I think you'd have to buy up the contracts of a lot of people who funded small portions in order to see a significant upside. Part of the premise is that the public good is worth more to each individual than the amount they get paid if it's not created (which is in turn worth more than they paid). So I don't think each individual wouldn't have much incentive to sell their contract in my imagined scenario, but I'm not sure.
Although the government might try to sell it as a block, it could get split up later. Then there would be a free rider problem - it would be tempting to get some ConTracked, not build a bridge, and hope somebody else built the bridge and you profited off of it. If enough people hold it in expectation of this, it might be hard for any bridge-building company to accumulate enough that building the bridge is profitable.
This isn't a huge problem - probably it would stay as a block - but I think this might make it strictly inferior to just issuing one ConTracked worth $1 billion. But I didn't use that example because it doesn't feel as token-like and is just sort of a cash-on-delivery subcontractable contract.
Is that really a free rider problem though? Presumably the builder would be selling off pieces of the block to raise capital, perhaps to, say, an investment firm, who proceeds to profit if the contract comes in. Kind of like a single-project startup.
It depends on how the ICO is structured. If all coins are sold to a single bidder who makes the highest bid, then there's no free-rider problem, and the firm can sell off blocks of coins to subcontract or raise capital. OTOH, if the ICO allows more than one party to buy the coins, you could have a situation where 90% of the coins were sold to the bridge-builder, and the other 10% were sold to a speculator who won't help build the bridge.
Isn't the ConTracked more valuable to the company building the bridge than it is to any potential buyer? They should presumably have a greater confidence that the bridge will actually get built (due to insider information) and therefore assign the ConTracked a higher expected value than anyone who is not planning to build it themselves. (And if people believe the above reasoning, then the mere fact that the builders want to sell it to you implies that their inside information says you are overpaying and you should run away.)
Why shouldn't they keep the ConTracked and raise capital via whatever method they were using before?
"If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again."
And the thing is, if I'm bidding on the bridge-building contract but I don't have enough liquidity/capacity/expertise to build it myself, then selling a share of the tokens on to either raise capital or sub-contract to the specialists in concrete-pouring or whatever makes sense - but if I'm doing it at a discounted price, where is the difference here to ordinary hiring of sub-contractors to do it for you?
I can see the logic behind original bidder going "here is a block of 10,000 coins which will be worth $10,000 once the bridge is built; I will sell these to you for $8,000 so I can raise the cash" - the purchaser is hoping to make $2,000 profit on the transaction once the bridge is built and the government stumps up the value of the ConTract coins. But by the same token, isn't the builder *losing* that money? And if the original contractor sells the block of $10,000 for $12,000 (so they raise capital and don't lose out), then how is the purchaser/investor making money? Unless they sell it on at a higher price themselves, or hope to buy back more ConTract coins in a later round at a cheaper price from those who bought a further sold-on block of coins? (I'm getting dizzy thinking of this).
I can see Bob The Builder selling a block of 10,000 to Denis The Developer for $8,000 who then sells it on for $6,000 in the hopes that when it gets far enough down the chain he can buy it back from Maurice The Merchant for $3,000 (but it'll be worth $10,000 when Government George pays out on completion of the bridge) but it seems convoluted. And I'm not sure I'm getting the point of the exercise correct anyhow.
> but if I'm doing it at a discounted price, where is the difference here to ordinary hiring of sub-contractors to do it for you?
Discount to what, though? The price originally paid, or the face value of the coin?
In this scenario, the coin is really something like an options contract: it can be redeemed for $1/coin if the bridge is built and expires worthless otherwise. The closer the bridge is to completion, the more valuable the coins become. As the coins approach the deadline (without the bridge built), the less valuable the coins become.
A design firm could buy up the initial stake of coins, perform initial design work, and then use that progress to resell the coins at a profit -- but still less than face value -- to a construction firm to implement said design.
Mind you, none of this requires a "coin" or even a blockchain, but that's not the point of the thought experiment.
The way you set up the ConTracked, it's a call option that expires in the money if the bridge gets built and out of the money if it doesn't. Purely binary. However, when you add in the financial guys and the sabitrage (genius!!!) and the rest of it, the value of a set of ConTracked tokens will fluctuate up and down prior to the completion or complete failure of the project. They will get distributed to subcontractors as partial payment, those subcontractors will sell some for funds and keep the rest, and so on.
Alternatively, you could think of it as an extremely high interest bond. Maybe thee 100 year Argentina bond will be worth face value of $1000 if Argentina's currency somehow hasn't died again in 100 years, but today it's worth $2.50. If there's another coup, it's worth $0.05. If the coup was successfully run by the bank that bought all the bonds at $0.05, then suddenly maybe they'll be worth $40. So on and so forth.
The current value of the instrument demonstrates the implied interest rate, which is equivalent to expected risk in the investment.
It could totally work.
Then, the Fed steps in and buys the instruments at face value in order to stimulate demand.
Then, the hedgies jump in and buy them at higher-than-face value, because they suspect that a greater fool will buy them at higher-than-higher-than-etc.
Then Davey Day Trader starts talking about how ConTrackeds only go up....
Under the current financial system, the government is the lender of last resort & can "self-insure" against risk much more effectively than any private party. Offloading that risk onto the market raises costs by much more than the risk is worth. (According to researcher Alon Levy, this is one of the main drivers behind high US infrastructure costs; c.f. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/30/who-should-bear-the-risk-in-infrastructure-projects/.)
The usual rule-of-thumb is that risks should be assigned to the party best positioned to efficiently mitigate them (thereby incentivizing them to do so). I would naively expect this would usually be the party doing the actual construction.
I read the page you linked and as best I can follow, it seems to be saying:
1) An example of people keeping the biggest risks public (but I see no analysis of whether they are actually profiting thereby)
2) A complaint from US contractors saying their profits are low when they bear risks (isn't keeping their profits low the whole point of bidding? why is this bad from the public's perspective?)
3) Link to a paper that they summarize as saying that we pay contractors more when we assign the risks to them. (I don't understand why this is surprising or how it supports their position; obviously they should be paid *something* for taking on those risks. I'm not willing to read an entire ~50 page paper on this subject at this time, sorry.)
In particular, I don't see any discussion of the usual rule-of-thumb (see my first paragraph) and either how they are following it or why they think they shouldn't.
Could you explain whatever you believe I'm not understanding?
Maybe with Reddit's collective effort we can short squeeze ConTracked and therefore force Wall Street to buy non-existent bridges. "Ohhh Wall Street, I have a bridge to sell you...."
The only way your attempted joke about RedCoin works is if you haven't read and understood Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form in general.
If you get joy out of reading things wrong and providing no citations, then I suppose I can be regarded as a killjoy.
Disclaimer: my above sentence is a joke, and the precedent has already been set that I am allowed to be uncharitable to people if it's a funny enough joke.
It's definitely better if the humor can go along with the theory to a greater degree. But when it's just humor, it's fine to have some glaring gaps sometimes. (I did find the others more amusing though because most of them work a little bit better on their own terms.)
A gestalt impression based on what? Do you often write blogs about things you've only thought vaguely about?
In any case, you're the one making a positive case and that means you require citations. I'm simply asking you to back up your assertions with quotes. The burden of proof falls on your shoulders, Scott. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.", as Hitchens famously said. If you make the claim that Marx "always" says something, then you should be able to easily find it in his work. Otherwise you're simply not being charitable to an outgroup thinker.
Saying "Gestalt impression" is not an excuse for your own lack of citations.
Imagine if the New York Times openly said they wrote their article based on a "gestalt impression" of Scott Alexander, and then refused to cite any sources.
Instead of kicking down the door in your haste to attack Scott, why not try a positive approach. If you had said something like "Fun fact, it's actually a common misconception that Communism as envisioned by Marx is non-hierarchical. Here's a list of sources" I think plenty of people would have been interested.
Fun fact: Marx had a very particular analysis of money and capitalism and didn't think currency should simply be shared equally among every person. Here's a source:
Do you disagree with the statement "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"?
The problem here is that Scott Alexander simply writes things that have zero sources or citations. I have criticized Scott Alexander's readings of Marx before, e.g. here:
Given that Scott Alexander never responds to these kinds of criticisms and that he keeps making the exact same mistakes I am currently finding it effective to just say "cite source please".
Remember, the Rationalist community has standards about being charitable, not strawmanning people, and not dismissing something just because it comes from an outgroup thinker. For some reason this standard is thrown out of the window when it comes to Marx.
(1) From "Marx's Vision of Communism", discussing the second stage when "Full Communism" should have been achieved:
"All such developments are best viewed as constituting the foundations of communism. What, then, is communism? Marx's comments on the life and organization that come into being on these foundations, though even more general and less systematic than his comments on the first stage, offer a description of communism that can be summarized in six main points: 1) The division of labor, as Marx understands it, has come to an end, and with it the subjection of individuals to a single life task. People now feel the need and have the ability to perform many kinds of work. 2) Activity with and for others, at work, in consumption, and during free time, has become a prime want, ownership has been extended to cover all of nature from the land and the sea to the food each person eats and the clothes he or she wears. Individual ownership, private property in all its guises, has been abolished. 4) Everything with which as person comes into contact, which at this time means the entire world, becomes the product of his/her conscious efforts to bend things to his/her own purposes. Instead of submitting to chance as formerly, people, through their knowledge and control over natural forces, make their own chance. 5) People's activities are no longer organized by external forces, with the exception of productive work where such organization still exists but in the manner of an orchestra leader who directs a willing orchestra (the example is Marx's). As a part of this, restrictive rules are unknown; nor is there any coercion or punishment. The state too withers away. 6) The divisions we are accustomed to seeing in the human species along lines of nation, race, religion, geographical section (town dweller and country dweller), occupation, class, and family have all ceased to exist. They are replaced by new and, as yet, unnamed divisions more in keeping with the character of the people and life of this period."
Certainly it appears that for Marx, hierarchy develops out of class structures, which in turn develop historically out of social and economic conditions. Convert everyone to being a member of the proletariat, do away with the class conditions of the past, and social/economic hierarchies as we know them will also vanish. There then remains the Utopian ideal of fully-achieved post-revolutionary Communism where human flourishing is the main goal, everyone will be a Renaissance person (able to do a bit of any task that needs doing), and the old divisions and hierarchies will vanish. Perhaps there will be a new hierarchy/hierarchies, but they won't rest on worker/boss, male/female, white/non-white, religion/no religion, artistic/scientific, or any other current division we now have.
Firstly that's a quote by Bertell Ollman, not Marx. Secondly you've already created a distinction - "social/economic hierarchies", not hierarchies in general. Marx is very specific about his wording and language, and I would like people who put words into his mouth to do the same.
A member of a minority who speaks up when someone uses slurs against them. Alternatively, someone who inserts himself into conversations he isn't part of to defend himself against implications made.
There was a famous comic about it some years back. The leftist author intended it to be the second interpretation (and talk about the gaming worker ants), but it was quickly noticed that the first interpretation was just as valid for the sealion portrayed in the comic.
Honestly I'd be interested in seeing what people think the further implications of this argument are. Like what exactly is this "human nature" that so interests Scott Alexander and how would he describe it? Every time I press people on this it seems to be banal generalities like "People are greedy" or "people like to be creative". But then you can say also say the opposite like "People like sharing things" and "people like to just go through the motions". So I'm not really sure what this human nature stuff is supposed to prove one way or another. Ok, a series of traits we can collectively label 'human nature' exists... and... ?
If RedCoin is distributed the more to those who have the least RedCoin, then given I have no RedCoin I should be given *all* the RedCoin! Except now I am bloated with profit and nobody else has any RedCoin so all my RedCoin is now re-distributed to others. The problem I foresee there is that nobody gets any benefit from having RedCoin since it is constantly being taken away and re-distributed as soon as anyone gets any more than the next person. And even if you do get to a state where everyone has, for instance, ten RedCoin, then as soon as a new person joins, the whole cycle starts up again.
RedCoin is still a proof of work coin, the work is just shifted from doing hashes as quickly as possible to creating new wallets as quickly as possible.
CryptoKitties: An Etheruem based platform for buying and selling digital kitty icons. Cats can also be bred with other cats, resulting in offspring with a unique combination of traits, including fur pattern, eye shape, and eye color. The first cat generated, Genesis, sold for over $100,000 two months after launch.
Banned because: The game became so popular that it eventually took over the Ethereum platform, preventing any other businesses from using it. This was considered monopolistic behavior and it was forced to shut down.
When one party had unified control of the government, they passed a major infrastructure bill on a strict party-line vote to issue ConTracked for a bunch of large construction projects that the other party opposed.
A few months later there was an election, the other party took power, and they barred all workers from the construction sites for trespassing on government land.
There's some other issues (or potential benefits: In general, infrastructure contracts are a monospony, so one of the things that make them cost-effective is to have a good government-side team who knows what they need from the contractors and how to resolve issues (this is why privatizing doesn't let you eliminate the city's planning department - the city still needs to know what it's paying for). OTOH, in theory if the goals are vague enough you might be able to use betting markets to replace the city planning department - just make the contract pay out when people vote that they can (in the bridge example) effectively get across the river. If the contractor discovers a geological issue and needs to know if moving the bridge two miles upstream would still qualify, they can announce their intention to do this and see if the value of the coin goes down.
> One issue with ConTracked is that for infrastructure projects involving risk, it's better for the government to take the risk than to put it all on private contractors (since private companies are much smaller and require a higher risk premium
Hm, so maybe a big investment company should buy the ConTracked and hire a construction company to build the bridge. I suppose for big prrojects this still might be too much risk for any one company to take on, but maybe a consortium of funds could invest in the ConTracked.
So this seems like a more general issue with finance that actually confuses me a bit. In general, there's a risk/reward tradeoff in investments, but why doesn't some giant fund just say "we'll take the risky investments and, for a small premium, give lower-risk tolerant people safer income?
The answer I'd guess is: That's basically what the mortgage backed securities stuff in the big short were - taking a lump of risky assets and reducing the risk by investing them in a big way - and it runs the risk that one big shock could bring the whole thing down. And since a big shock can hit an entire sector, or multiple sectors, there's no real safe way to do this even for massive funds.
(so e.g. in this example, the consortium's problem would be that a major shock to the entire construction industry could drive them bankrupt, and now the entire industry is depressed for years).
I think you’re basically correct. The big problem with the idea of being super rich, taking on a ton of risk, and getting fairly compensated for it is that it only works if the risks are uncorrelated. Otherwise, all your investments are going to blow up simultaneously if there is a serious market crash, something that would be a one-in-a-trillion event if your investments were all IID normal distribution Mediocristan munis or something. The idea of “easy money” from taking on a bunch of “uncorrelated” risk is what the banks convinced themselves of in 2008, and what Long-Term Capital Management convinced themselves of in 1989, and both failed in basically the same way.
Integrity: All traditional blockchains are vulnerable to corruption if enough nodes in the network decide to go rogue and may be attacked by a bad actor who has accumulated vast amounts of computing power or on-chain currency. Using cryptographic obfuscation techniques, the Integrity network can achieve trustless consensus even when every node but one is maliciously coordinating. Participants in the network do a great deal of computation and exchange large amounts of data, but no one can tell what the computations are actually doing or what the machines are saying to each other. The workings are irretrievably scrambled, they can't be feasibly decoded even by a hypothetical omniscient agent. You submit a transaction or query to an input buffer and some moments later the confirmation or result is written out for you along with a digital signature proving it genuine, but everything in between appears to be garbage, a black box. Because processing of transactions only needs a little bit of redundancy with full trust, the only overhead on the network is the cryptographic protocols required to scramble its internals, which due to recent algorithmic breakthroughs makes Integrity over 100 times more efficient than BuffyCoin, the closest competitor, using 1000000 times less electricity.
Banned because: The entrenched crypto industry is too big to fail
There are potential practical problems with the implementation.
The way I know of doing a 51% attack relies on double spend: you own some COIN, trade it to a 3rd party exchange for COIN2 (e.g. ETH) that has real value, then rollback the COIN transaction so you still have as much as you started with. So GenghisCoin PLC can't steal all the existing coin with a 51% attack, it can only sell off what it has (multiple times, until the market adjusts). You can still redistribute to proportional GenghisCoin, though: swap it for ETH, then divide the ETH proportionally. Shame about the transaction fees, though.
Presumably you don't want to buy these coins on the market. Fortunately, you'll get them while mining COIN in the attempt to get 51% of the mining power. Unfortunately, these coins will be owned by your users, unless you set up some infrastructure to send everything to a centralized wallet (which you want to do, because that way when you double-spend you only have to send from one wallet, instead of from one wallet for every user, each of which creates a new block).
So here the idea morphs into letting people mine an unpopular but still reasonably expensive COIN, and taking their mined COIN and giving them GenghisCoin in the hope that you reach 51% mining power. And this looks a lot like a scam, because there's no guarantee that you'll reach 51% mining power.
Lots of reasons, Chris provided one for the actual implementation being almost impossible. But assuming it was possible and that a successful attack allowed you to plunder all the coins of a chain, then what? The attack being successful kills the value of the coins looted. No one will buy a Bitcoin from your when you can just steal it back so your plunder is worthless. And with the incentive gone the rest of it falls apart, it becomes just a way to coordinate attacks meant to destroy coins and you don't need a chain to do that.
> spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time
Read it first as if they're racing against each other, which would be an even more interesting idea. E.g. you have to get as fast as you can to some point, and your money is at stake
RandiCoin: A decentralized protocol to make and verify claims of supernatural phenomena. Users may post claims of supernatural activity at the cost of a transaction fee. Other users are then rewarded for attempts to verify or refute these claims. If the claim stands up to all scrutiny, the poster of the claim is rewarded with a significant portion of the market cap of the currency.
Banned because: Mysterious messages started appear on the blockchain that gave eerily accurate predictions of the future. The cryptographic signatures seemed to rule out every single user as being the originator of these messages. The SEC deemed this to be a form of insider trading.
CellCoin: A technology that harnesses your cells to engage in proof-of-work without requiring any computer or even conscious effort. In a feature added to spread the wealth, you can also share CellCoin with your neighbors without diminishing your own stake.
Banned because: Excessive investment in CellCoin can cause fever, respiratory distress, and (in some cases) death.
CellCoin mining requires access to the latest confirmed block, which is acquired through wireless internet. One reliable way to stop CellCoin mining in your body, along with its adverse side effects, is distancing yourself from all cellular networks.
MittCoin: Mitt Romney launched his ICO at the same time as his 2024 presidential campaign, promising an executive order to make it the official currency of the United States if he wins.
Banned because: congress and senate still controlled by dems, preemptively impeached Mitt in October 2024.
Preemptive impeachment! Off topic, but I’m probably the last person to realize that a person no longer needs to be a sitting president to be impeached! I’m imagining a president after election but before taking office, or from years past being impeached. Crazy to consider!
Maybe but this impeachment took place when he was in office. Only the impeachment trial is happening after his term ended. This is not the first time either.
Ether-ium: named after a character in the Book of Mormon, the latter day saints were having trouble tracking the state of their global membership across thousands of parishes (which they call Wards and Stakes), and decided to use a distributed ledger. This also simplifies the process of collecting tithing, as ten percent of the coins automatically revert to church control upon minting. To reduce chances of adversarial takeover, only church members are allowed to participate, as verified by proof of Stake.
Banned because: concerns about separation of church and state
RedCoin "reverse proof of stake": splitting your holdings of RC into N even-sized wallets increases the quantity of RC you earn by N^2-fold (for the obvious interpretation; or at least N-fold, for a flat per-wallet distribution). Not banned, just submerged by the number of wallet creations.
No, your Honour, I was not soliciting. All I did was gift this upstanding young lady a modest quantity of altcoins, backed by a smart contract such that they would lose their value unless I got laid tonight.
(does anybody else spend a weird amount of time thinking about WWII Hawaii Overprint banknotes?)
I have been toying with the idea of Vice and Virtue coins. One of the interesting things about systems like ethereum and coins built on top of it is that if a smart contract awards you a Vice coin (perhaps a non fungible token indicating that you have done some specific bad deed), there's nothing you can do to reject or pass on that coin without the smart contract letting you.
This could let you assign Vice coins that advertise someone's misdeeds, and only clear them if they acquire Virtue or purchase Indulgence coins.
...sometimes I wonder about "fitting in" at SSC. Like, Scott posts something funny, and my first impulse is to quibble with (large) bits of it. Well, maybe I'll look at what other people posted.
RedCoin actually sounds pretty fun to build as a learning project. Unfortunately, I don't understand enough about regular money to understand Bitcoin; only the technical CompSci parts make something close to sense to me...
Umanity sounds like a good thing, but probably wouldn't work in real life since computers are now getting so good at solving certain types of Captchas that they even beat humans - e.g. see the shift from the two word captchas 5 years ago to what we have now; that happened because to evade the latest bots the words had to be so convoluted that a significant amount of humans couldn't decipher them either. The pressure to automate the solving process for the Umanity captchas would be immense given the potential reward to whoever manages to crack it.
CthuCoin: CthuCoin is mined by gibbering and shrieking in incomprehensible tongues which were ancient when the stars were young. Validity of this shrieking is verified in a decentralized process whereby Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, causes those who have heard his dread name to all call out in one voice that it is so, it is so, this coin bears the Name.
Banned because: when addressing concerns regarding the spontaneous flammability of the hair and eyes of professional shriekers, the head of the SEC was heard to cry 'They are here! All is woe! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn!' before promptly expiring. Though this is not strictly speaking illegal, the SEC frankly finds this to be a bit of a nuisance and is pulling rank.
WHJCoin: Invented by the r/WSBs crowd and popular among proponents of gold-backed currencies, WHJCoin was the darling of the industry. Through a proprietary combination of GPS and Fitbit whenever an HJ is given in the parking lot of a Wendy’s a Coin is created. Coins are accepted at 7-Eleven, Super-8 Motels, and Apple Pay.
Banned because: A hedge fund manager shorted WHJCoin. The bet looked to be going well until a group of Redditors drove the price of WHJCoins sky high. The hedge fund manager had no other option – at least for this investment – but to acquire more Coins and, well, you know the rest.
I don't subscribe to the podcast Patreon, so I just want to give a shout-out to SolenoidEntity who clearly cracked a bit at reading the Driverify portion. :)
my man this is epic. I've been lurk-reading since you came back online and I have to say.... the depth, breadth and ... well ... all of it. It's nothing short of great. I'm subbing.
I'm still trying to figure out how even with Wall Street-sponsored sabotage, ConTracked wouldn't be way, way superior to the current government contract and acquisitions system.
I mean, hedge funds gonna hedge fund, right? So you'll have some that short the ConTracked and hire saboteurs to blow up the bridges, but others will go long the ConTracked derivative instrument and pay for security and help with financials and such... Sounds perfectly feasible.
Somehow, I don't think the government is interested in anything that incentivizes outright sabotage of government projects.
In the normal functioning of American democracy, half of the government is interested in sabotaging the projects of the other half. A successful project will be optimized to be difficult to sabotage: "His financial system is a work of genius. I couldn't undo it if I tried. And I tried." -- Thomas Jefferson
I don't think Jefferson said that ;)
"The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you can never know if they are genuine." —Abraham Lincoln.
- Lin Manuel Miranda
Similar incentives already exist to sabotage all public companies.
It seems to not be a big problem in reality.
I think the word you're looking for is "sabitrage".
The key advantage of ConTracked is just that the winning bid for the contract needs to put up a deposit that is forfeited if the bridge doesn't get built, right?
Modulo deposits, it looks like buying a billion CT for $X is equivalent to winning a contract to build the bridge for ($1 billion - X), and selling your billion CT is equivalent to subcontracting someone else to build it for you, and the fact that we have a billion tokens worth $1 rather than one token worth $1B is just to encourage gambling?
You can also subcontract in parts to give your contractors a stake in the success of the project.
But yeah, that one is comparatively easy to replicate through contracts.
I think the benefit is that it simplifies accounting for the government. With ConTracked, the only thing they have to care about is whether the bridge meets the specs. It does? Flip a switch and ConTracked coins are now worth money - whatever companies were responsible for building it get whatever the money they agreed between themselves. It doesn't? Ain't bad either, the government can try again, and they're ahead $X.
The only thing I'm unclear on is where does the money come from when the switch is flicked. Turning $0 of coins into $1B of coins sounds like printing $1B out of thin air, which is presumably Not Good.
Turning $0 of coins into $1B of coins sounds like printing $1B out of thin air, which is presumably fiat currency. FTFY
It's not printing money, it's just spending it. If the bridge is built, the government owes 1 billion dollars, otherwise owes zero.
The government *can* print money to pay that debt, just like they could for anything they spend money on, but it doesn't have to. It could just be a line in the budget - "1 billion dollars for the bridge if the ConTrack resolves."
If you want to be really confident that the government isn't going to print money, you could make them put the money in escrow when the coins are created, and then the money either goes to the coin owner or back to the government depending on if the bridge was built.
And then, by Murphy's Law, they'll print money to put in escrow.
Technically the central bank (which is supposed to be independent from the government) is the entity which prints money.
Yeah, that was a cynical joke, not actual monetary policy.
Your company/companies build a bridge. They are NOT going to wait for payment depending on "does it meet specs?". They are NOT going to take on a contract that says "you go ahead and sink all this money and time and resources into building a bridge but we reserve the right at the last minute to go 'nah we don't like it' and pay you nothing". Taking on a government contract means they EXPECT to be paid at least something.
Also, if they build a crummy bridge, what happens next? Do you get them to tear it down? Who builds a new one? Do you get the new bidder to repair the crummy bridge? What about all the people seething over the disruption that "great, for the past eighteen months I've had to divert to a secondary road, now they can't even manage to get the damn thing right on the first try"?
The original story seems fairly clear that the government defines the required specs in advance and a neutral party determines whether they have been met. One could perhaps argue this can't be done for some reason, but complaints of yanking payment after the bridge is built are attacking a straw man.
And obviously companies would *prefer* to be paid sooner and follow laxer rules. But are you really arguing that there is *no one in the world* who would pick up a $1B contract to build a bridge if the only way to get it was to agree to tighter rules and a later payment? Even if they can charge more for that, because they aren't bidding against anyone who would get better terms?
If they build a crummy bridge, then presumably whoever buys the next round of ConTracked gets to deal with it however they want (as long as we end up with a spec-meeting bridge at the end), and the costs of whatever they plan to do are already built into their bid. It sucks in terms of timeline, but how is that any worse than if someone builds a crummy bridge NOW, under the current rules?
The government absolutely will change the specs while the bridge is under construction. That's a given - the specifications are the result of politics, and politics doesn't stop happening juts because someone broke ground on a new bridge. The current rules allow for this, and the contract is renegotiated whenever the government changes its mind. There's always some amount of money that will convince the contractor to build to the new specifications rather than continue under the original contract.
But with ConTracked, I don't see how you conduct that negotiation. If there were only one contractor involved, sure, you could issue $1.2B of Bridge 2.0 coins contingent on building the bridge to the new specs and *not* claiming the $1B contract on Bridge 1.0. With multiple contractors in the game, either there's a chance that the government gets stuck paying for an unwanted bridge, or a chance that the contractor sinks half a gigabuck into a bridge only to find that the rules have changed in a way that ensures their competitor gets the payoff. Or both.
Isn't that one of the advantages of the ConTracked system? A government procurement system that can't have the cost go up because politicians are playing games sounds like a good thing.
I suspect the main issue in practice would be that the contractor has to pay for everything upfront and they likely don't have that much cash on hand. Even if I think I can build the bridge for only half a billion dollars, which would make me a hefty profit, where am I gonna *get* half a billion?
That's a pretty big amount for a private lender.
A normal contractor would invoice you over time for the work they've done, so they don't need to float that much money. But you can't issue a ConTrack in installments - you might end up paying for a half-finished bridge.
(Or can you? Maybe you could make the ConTrack value be proportional to what % of the bridge has been constructed? But it would be hard to judge.)
Presumably you'd just sell a bunch of your ConTrck coins to investors.
I am sincerely curious, since I've had some small experience in Buying Stuff Under Government Procurement Rules, how this would work out.
I like that everyone is throwing around figures such as "so the government wants you to build a bridge for $1 billion". NO, THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T. The bridge may *end up* costing $1 billion, but that's due to Finagle's Law ("everything takes longer. and costs more.")
What the government wants is "We put the bridge building out to tender. We want as many tenders as we can get so we can get the cheapest price, because this is Your Tax Dollars At Work and votes depend on this - votes! to keep us in power and in our jobs! and the opposition party/parties will be watching like hawks to attack us for overspending! also we of course want to avoid bribery and corruption and Senator Smith's cousin's brother-in-law getting a fat contract due to kickbacks but ahem okay what is important here are the VOTES! and maybe yeah replacing the old bridge what fell down in the last storm".
So depending on the size of the project, the level of complexity (there may well only be one company capable of handling this), how much money the contractors perceive to be sloshing around, etc. you put this up on Eurotender (https://eurotender.de/index.php/en/tenders) and/or eTenders (https://www.etenders.gov.ie/) and wait for the bids to come in.
Some of them will be plainly chancing their arms and you know they have no hope of taking on a job of this scale. Some of them *will* be Senator Smith's cousin's brother-in-law. Hopefully you end up with at least three (that being the minimum number) that are reasonably priced for the job and able to do it.
Then the fun begins.
So yeah, I can think of many ways ConTracked would go horribly wrong (as mentioned, bidding on the job then selling on the contract and that being sold on etc. down the line until the last person holding the bag is the one company you did *not* want doing the job). I'd love to know how it would work, but I'm crying (tears of laughter) at the idea that it's as simple as "let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer". The BIG attraction of bidding on a government contract is that you, the buyer, want to make it as risk-free as possible so you write it into the contract that "even if the bridge blows up and falls down the Tuesday after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, we still get paid and have no legal liability. Just take the cost out of the taxes, everyone knows government has all this money sloshing around!"
I agree that it is not unlikely to go horribly wrong, but If Senator Smith's relative has to bid on the contract, is that not acceptable? He has to find a patsy, at least, to put inthe down payment.
And if the crap company gets all the crypto, and can't build the bridge properly, the government will screw them over.
Of course, the sheer risk inherent in this enterprise means that bids for government contract crypto are probably not going to be very high, and people will demand extra contract crypto to cover risk. You may not end up saving much money.
It sounds a bit like Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts, which aren't vulnerable to sabotage. And there's no interest in them for reasons Robin Hanson discusses in "Elephant in the Brain" (short version: hardly anyone cares about reforming the system to improve anything).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts
Anything with an upside and a short market can be vulnerable to sabotage. (But that's still a really cool idea. I like it.)
Even without shorting/betting against completion, it occurs to me there is another angle to incentivize sabotage. I think you'd have to buy up the contracts of a lot of people who funded small portions in order to see a significant upside. Part of the premise is that the public good is worth more to each individual than the amount they get paid if it's not created (which is in turn worth more than they paid). So I don't think each individual wouldn't have much incentive to sell their contract in my imagined scenario, but I'm not sure.
Although the government might try to sell it as a block, it could get split up later. Then there would be a free rider problem - it would be tempting to get some ConTracked, not build a bridge, and hope somebody else built the bridge and you profited off of it. If enough people hold it in expectation of this, it might be hard for any bridge-building company to accumulate enough that building the bridge is profitable.
This isn't a huge problem - probably it would stay as a block - but I think this might make it strictly inferior to just issuing one ConTracked worth $1 billion. But I didn't use that example because it doesn't feel as token-like and is just sort of a cash-on-delivery subcontractable contract.
Is that really a free rider problem though? Presumably the builder would be selling off pieces of the block to raise capital, perhaps to, say, an investment firm, who proceeds to profit if the contract comes in. Kind of like a single-project startup.
It depends on how the ICO is structured. If all coins are sold to a single bidder who makes the highest bid, then there's no free-rider problem, and the firm can sell off blocks of coins to subcontract or raise capital. OTOH, if the ICO allows more than one party to buy the coins, you could have a situation where 90% of the coins were sold to the bridge-builder, and the other 10% were sold to a speculator who won't help build the bridge.
Isn't the ConTracked more valuable to the company building the bridge than it is to any potential buyer? They should presumably have a greater confidence that the bridge will actually get built (due to insider information) and therefore assign the ConTracked a higher expected value than anyone who is not planning to build it themselves. (And if people believe the above reasoning, then the mere fact that the builders want to sell it to you implies that their inside information says you are overpaying and you should run away.)
Why shouldn't they keep the ConTracked and raise capital via whatever method they were using before?
That's how Scott states it originally:
"If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again."
And the thing is, if I'm bidding on the bridge-building contract but I don't have enough liquidity/capacity/expertise to build it myself, then selling a share of the tokens on to either raise capital or sub-contract to the specialists in concrete-pouring or whatever makes sense - but if I'm doing it at a discounted price, where is the difference here to ordinary hiring of sub-contractors to do it for you?
I can see the logic behind original bidder going "here is a block of 10,000 coins which will be worth $10,000 once the bridge is built; I will sell these to you for $8,000 so I can raise the cash" - the purchaser is hoping to make $2,000 profit on the transaction once the bridge is built and the government stumps up the value of the ConTract coins. But by the same token, isn't the builder *losing* that money? And if the original contractor sells the block of $10,000 for $12,000 (so they raise capital and don't lose out), then how is the purchaser/investor making money? Unless they sell it on at a higher price themselves, or hope to buy back more ConTract coins in a later round at a cheaper price from those who bought a further sold-on block of coins? (I'm getting dizzy thinking of this).
I can see Bob The Builder selling a block of 10,000 to Denis The Developer for $8,000 who then sells it on for $6,000 in the hopes that when it gets far enough down the chain he can buy it back from Maurice The Merchant for $3,000 (but it'll be worth $10,000 when Government George pays out on completion of the bridge) but it seems convoluted. And I'm not sure I'm getting the point of the exercise correct anyhow.
> but if I'm doing it at a discounted price, where is the difference here to ordinary hiring of sub-contractors to do it for you?
Discount to what, though? The price originally paid, or the face value of the coin?
In this scenario, the coin is really something like an options contract: it can be redeemed for $1/coin if the bridge is built and expires worthless otherwise. The closer the bridge is to completion, the more valuable the coins become. As the coins approach the deadline (without the bridge built), the less valuable the coins become.
A design firm could buy up the initial stake of coins, perform initial design work, and then use that progress to resell the coins at a profit -- but still less than face value -- to a construction firm to implement said design.
Mind you, none of this requires a "coin" or even a blockchain, but that's not the point of the thought experiment.
The way you set up the ConTracked, it's a call option that expires in the money if the bridge gets built and out of the money if it doesn't. Purely binary. However, when you add in the financial guys and the sabitrage (genius!!!) and the rest of it, the value of a set of ConTracked tokens will fluctuate up and down prior to the completion or complete failure of the project. They will get distributed to subcontractors as partial payment, those subcontractors will sell some for funds and keep the rest, and so on.
Alternatively, you could think of it as an extremely high interest bond. Maybe thee 100 year Argentina bond will be worth face value of $1000 if Argentina's currency somehow hasn't died again in 100 years, but today it's worth $2.50. If there's another coup, it's worth $0.05. If the coup was successfully run by the bank that bought all the bonds at $0.05, then suddenly maybe they'll be worth $40. So on and so forth.
The current value of the instrument demonstrates the implied interest rate, which is equivalent to expected risk in the investment.
It could totally work.
Then, the Fed steps in and buys the instruments at face value in order to stimulate demand.
Then, the hedgies jump in and buy them at higher-than-face value, because they suspect that a greater fool will buy them at higher-than-higher-than-etc.
Then Davey Day Trader starts talking about how ConTrackeds only go up....
Under the current financial system, the government is the lender of last resort & can "self-insure" against risk much more effectively than any private party. Offloading that risk onto the market raises costs by much more than the risk is worth. (According to researcher Alon Levy, this is one of the main drivers behind high US infrastructure costs; c.f. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/30/who-should-bear-the-risk-in-infrastructure-projects/.)
...and I see I was scooped by Shaked Koplewitz below. Drat!
The usual rule-of-thumb is that risks should be assigned to the party best positioned to efficiently mitigate them (thereby incentivizing them to do so). I would naively expect this would usually be the party doing the actual construction.
I read the page you linked and as best I can follow, it seems to be saying:
1) An example of people keeping the biggest risks public (but I see no analysis of whether they are actually profiting thereby)
2) A complaint from US contractors saying their profits are low when they bear risks (isn't keeping their profits low the whole point of bidding? why is this bad from the public's perspective?)
3) Link to a paper that they summarize as saying that we pay contractors more when we assign the risks to them. (I don't understand why this is surprising or how it supports their position; obviously they should be paid *something* for taking on those risks. I'm not willing to read an entire ~50 page paper on this subject at this time, sorry.)
In particular, I don't see any discussion of the usual rule-of-thumb (see my first paragraph) and either how they are following it or why they think they shouldn't.
Could you explain whatever you believe I'm not understanding?
I LOL at these kinds of posts harder than just about anything. I really missed these during the great absence.
Maybe with Reddit's collective effort we can short squeeze ConTracked and therefore force Wall Street to buy non-existent bridges. "Ohhh Wall Street, I have a bridge to sell you...."
The only way your attempted joke about RedCoin works is if you haven't read and understood Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form in general.
>RedCoin: Karl Marx always said that communism would be a non-hierarchical economic system that prospered after the state withered away.
Where did he say "non-hierarchical"? Using quotes from a primary source please. This should be easy since you've claimed he "always" said it.
I think the reference is right here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny
I don't think "I'll ignore a glaring problem because some people may find it funny" is a good precedent to set.
Boy, you Marxists sure are killjoys aren't you?
Yeah, no class at all.
THIS made me lol!!!
If you get joy out of reading things wrong and providing no citations, then I suppose I can be regarded as a killjoy.
Disclaimer: my above sentence is a joke, and the precedent has already been set that I am allowed to be uncharitable to people if it's a funny enough joke.
It's a comedy post. That's a perfectly fine precedent to set.
It's definitely better if the humor can go along with the theory to a greater degree. But when it's just humor, it's fine to have some glaring gaps sometimes. (I did find the others more amusing though because most of them work a little bit better on their own terms.)
Username checks out.
Gestalt impression. If you think he supported a hierarchical society, why don't you quote me the primary sources that make you think that?
A gestalt impression based on what? Do you often write blogs about things you've only thought vaguely about?
In any case, you're the one making a positive case and that means you require citations. I'm simply asking you to back up your assertions with quotes. The burden of proof falls on your shoulders, Scott. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.", as Hitchens famously said. If you make the claim that Marx "always" says something, then you should be able to easily find it in his work. Otherwise you're simply not being charitable to an outgroup thinker.
Saying "Gestalt impression" is not an excuse for your own lack of citations.
And as one Charles Brown famously said, "good grief!"
Imagine if the New York Times openly said they wrote their article based on a "gestalt impression" of Scott Alexander, and then refused to cite any sources.
Dude, it's a joke post.
Instead of kicking down the door in your haste to attack Scott, why not try a positive approach. If you had said something like "Fun fact, it's actually a common misconception that Communism as envisioned by Marx is non-hierarchical. Here's a list of sources" I think plenty of people would have been interested.
Marxbro is a good Bible-bashing ultra-fundamentalist literalist of the type "where does it say that in the Bible?", except for the works of Marx 😁
When someone claims that Marx "always said" something then it's entirely appropriate to ask for sources.
Fun fact: Marx had a very particular analysis of money and capitalism and didn't think currency should simply be shared equally among every person. Here's a source:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
This is not good praxis bro https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6OjvOZWsAMW-Cb
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6OjvOZWsAMW-Cb?format=png&name=900x900
Do you disagree with the statement "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"?
The problem here is that Scott Alexander simply writes things that have zero sources or citations. I have criticized Scott Alexander's readings of Marx before, e.g. here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/fpbulfv/
Given that Scott Alexander never responds to these kinds of criticisms and that he keeps making the exact same mistakes I am currently finding it effective to just say "cite source please".
Remember, the Rationalist community has standards about being charitable, not strawmanning people, and not dismissing something just because it comes from an outgroup thinker. For some reason this standard is thrown out of the window when it comes to Marx.
(1) From "Marx's Vision of Communism", discussing the second stage when "Full Communism" should have been achieved:
"All such developments are best viewed as constituting the foundations of communism. What, then, is communism? Marx's comments on the life and organization that come into being on these foundations, though even more general and less systematic than his comments on the first stage, offer a description of communism that can be summarized in six main points: 1) The division of labor, as Marx understands it, has come to an end, and with it the subjection of individuals to a single life task. People now feel the need and have the ability to perform many kinds of work. 2) Activity with and for others, at work, in consumption, and during free time, has become a prime want, ownership has been extended to cover all of nature from the land and the sea to the food each person eats and the clothes he or she wears. Individual ownership, private property in all its guises, has been abolished. 4) Everything with which as person comes into contact, which at this time means the entire world, becomes the product of his/her conscious efforts to bend things to his/her own purposes. Instead of submitting to chance as formerly, people, through their knowledge and control over natural forces, make their own chance. 5) People's activities are no longer organized by external forces, with the exception of productive work where such organization still exists but in the manner of an orchestra leader who directs a willing orchestra (the example is Marx's). As a part of this, restrictive rules are unknown; nor is there any coercion or punishment. The state too withers away. 6) The divisions we are accustomed to seeing in the human species along lines of nation, race, religion, geographical section (town dweller and country dweller), occupation, class, and family have all ceased to exist. They are replaced by new and, as yet, unnamed divisions more in keeping with the character of the people and life of this period."
Link to this article here: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/vision_of_communism.php#124
(2) Internet archive translation into English of primary sources - writings of Marx and Engels, link here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm
Certainly it appears that for Marx, hierarchy develops out of class structures, which in turn develop historically out of social and economic conditions. Convert everyone to being a member of the proletariat, do away with the class conditions of the past, and social/economic hierarchies as we know them will also vanish. There then remains the Utopian ideal of fully-achieved post-revolutionary Communism where human flourishing is the main goal, everyone will be a Renaissance person (able to do a bit of any task that needs doing), and the old divisions and hierarchies will vanish. Perhaps there will be a new hierarchy/hierarchies, but they won't rest on worker/boss, male/female, white/non-white, religion/no religion, artistic/scientific, or any other current division we now have.
Firstly that's a quote by Bertell Ollman, not Marx. Secondly you've already created a distinction - "social/economic hierarchies", not hierarchies in general. Marx is very specific about his wording and language, and I would like people who put words into his mouth to do the same.
Is this satire?
He *really* wants to be the first sea lion banned from ACT, but I'm not sure why.
Completionism
What's a sea lion?
A member of a minority who speaks up when someone uses slurs against them. Alternatively, someone who inserts himself into conversations he isn't part of to defend himself against implications made.
There was a famous comic about it some years back. The leftist author intended it to be the second interpretation (and talk about the gaming worker ants), but it was quickly noticed that the first interpretation was just as valid for the sealion portrayed in the comic.
It seems to be people's way of saying that I talk too much and they want me to shut up.
I looked up the relevant comic, as I hadn't heard the term either: http://wondermark.com/1k62/
No, it's a legitimate criticism.
No, it's MarxBro. MarxBro has been like this for years, and it wouldn't really be an SSC-adjacent forum if he weren't here (and eventually, banned).
Honestly I'd be interested in seeing what people think the further implications of this argument are. Like what exactly is this "human nature" that so interests Scott Alexander and how would he describe it? Every time I press people on this it seems to be banal generalities like "People are greedy" or "people like to be creative". But then you can say also say the opposite like "People like sharing things" and "people like to just go through the motions". So I'm not really sure what this human nature stuff is supposed to prove one way or another. Ok, a series of traits we can collectively label 'human nature' exists... and... ?
Oh boy, you're going to like my submission to the book review contest. Or at least, you're going to have a lot to say about it.
True RedCoin has never been tried.
If RedCoin is distributed the more to those who have the least RedCoin, then given I have no RedCoin I should be given *all* the RedCoin! Except now I am bloated with profit and nobody else has any RedCoin so all my RedCoin is now re-distributed to others. The problem I foresee there is that nobody gets any benefit from having RedCoin since it is constantly being taken away and re-distributed as soon as anyone gets any more than the next person. And even if you do get to a state where everyone has, for instance, ten RedCoin, then as soon as a new person joins, the whole cycle starts up again.
RedCoin is still a proof of work coin, the work is just shifted from doing hashes as quickly as possible to creating new wallets as quickly as possible.
I too love economies driven by normalization errors.
CryptoKitties: An Etheruem based platform for buying and selling digital kitty icons. Cats can also be bred with other cats, resulting in offspring with a unique combination of traits, including fur pattern, eye shape, and eye color. The first cat generated, Genesis, sold for over $100,000 two months after launch.
Banned because: The game became so popular that it eventually took over the Ethereum platform, preventing any other businesses from using it. This was considered monopolistic behavior and it was forced to shut down.
Banned because: The SEC chair was annoyed at how much money his teenage daughter was spending on the game.
The problem with digital kitty icons is that, unlike real cats, you can't pet them. You're left with an invisible touch.
Like real cats, when you look up from your screen, you can't see them.
They take control and slowly tear economy apart.
In case anybody missed it: this isn't just a hilarious joke, this actually happened.
Well, it wasn't banned from what I can tell. People still trade them for ludicrous amounts of money.
Holy shit.
Thank you, I had completely forgotten about that one !
https://www.cryptokitties.co/
You have been front-run by reality.
When one party had unified control of the government, they passed a major infrastructure bill on a strict party-line vote to issue ConTracked for a bunch of large construction projects that the other party opposed.
A few months later there was an election, the other party took power, and they barred all workers from the construction sites for trespassing on government land.
Since as rationalists, being overly analytical of jokes is our job:
One issue with ConTracked is that for infrastructure projects involving risk, it's better for the government to take the risk than to put it all on private contractors (since private companies are much smaller and require a higher risk premium, see here for more https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/30/who-should-bear-the-risk-in-infrastructure-projects/ ).
There's some other issues (or potential benefits: In general, infrastructure contracts are a monospony, so one of the things that make them cost-effective is to have a good government-side team who knows what they need from the contractors and how to resolve issues (this is why privatizing doesn't let you eliminate the city's planning department - the city still needs to know what it's paying for). OTOH, in theory if the goals are vague enough you might be able to use betting markets to replace the city planning department - just make the contract pay out when people vote that they can (in the bridge example) effectively get across the river. If the contractor discovers a geological issue and needs to know if moving the bridge two miles upstream would still qualify, they can announce their intention to do this and see if the value of the coin goes down.
> One issue with ConTracked is that for infrastructure projects involving risk, it's better for the government to take the risk than to put it all on private contractors (since private companies are much smaller and require a higher risk premium
Hm, so maybe a big investment company should buy the ConTracked and hire a construction company to build the bridge. I suppose for big prrojects this still might be too much risk for any one company to take on, but maybe a consortium of funds could invest in the ConTracked.
So this seems like a more general issue with finance that actually confuses me a bit. In general, there's a risk/reward tradeoff in investments, but why doesn't some giant fund just say "we'll take the risky investments and, for a small premium, give lower-risk tolerant people safer income?
The answer I'd guess is: That's basically what the mortgage backed securities stuff in the big short were - taking a lump of risky assets and reducing the risk by investing them in a big way - and it runs the risk that one big shock could bring the whole thing down. And since a big shock can hit an entire sector, or multiple sectors, there's no real safe way to do this even for massive funds.
(so e.g. in this example, the consortium's problem would be that a major shock to the entire construction industry could drive them bankrupt, and now the entire industry is depressed for years).
This was one of the things banks traditionally did - with all kinds of outcomes.
MBS *sort* of fall on that continuum, too.
See also annutities (fixed and to a lesser degree variable), whole life insurance, and maybe reverse mortgages?
I think you’re basically correct. The big problem with the idea of being super rich, taking on a ton of risk, and getting fairly compensated for it is that it only works if the risks are uncorrelated. Otherwise, all your investments are going to blow up simultaneously if there is a serious market crash, something that would be a one-in-a-trillion event if your investments were all IID normal distribution Mediocristan munis or something. The idea of “easy money” from taking on a bunch of “uncorrelated” risk is what the banks convinced themselves of in 2008, and what Long-Term Capital Management convinced themselves of in 1989, and both failed in basically the same way.
Integrity: All traditional blockchains are vulnerable to corruption if enough nodes in the network decide to go rogue and may be attacked by a bad actor who has accumulated vast amounts of computing power or on-chain currency. Using cryptographic obfuscation techniques, the Integrity network can achieve trustless consensus even when every node but one is maliciously coordinating. Participants in the network do a great deal of computation and exchange large amounts of data, but no one can tell what the computations are actually doing or what the machines are saying to each other. The workings are irretrievably scrambled, they can't be feasibly decoded even by a hypothetical omniscient agent. You submit a transaction or query to an input buffer and some moments later the confirmation or result is written out for you along with a digital signature proving it genuine, but everything in between appears to be garbage, a black box. Because processing of transactions only needs a little bit of redundancy with full trust, the only overhead on the network is the cryptographic protocols required to scramble its internals, which due to recent algorithmic breakthroughs makes Integrity over 100 times more efficient than BuffyCoin, the closest competitor, using 1000000 times less electricity.
Banned because: The entrenched crypto industry is too big to fail
why has no one built GenghisCoin yet?
They have. But you have to guess which coin it actually is. Diversify!
There are potential practical problems with the implementation.
The way I know of doing a 51% attack relies on double spend: you own some COIN, trade it to a 3rd party exchange for COIN2 (e.g. ETH) that has real value, then rollback the COIN transaction so you still have as much as you started with. So GenghisCoin PLC can't steal all the existing coin with a 51% attack, it can only sell off what it has (multiple times, until the market adjusts). You can still redistribute to proportional GenghisCoin, though: swap it for ETH, then divide the ETH proportionally. Shame about the transaction fees, though.
Presumably you don't want to buy these coins on the market. Fortunately, you'll get them while mining COIN in the attempt to get 51% of the mining power. Unfortunately, these coins will be owned by your users, unless you set up some infrastructure to send everything to a centralized wallet (which you want to do, because that way when you double-spend you only have to send from one wallet, instead of from one wallet for every user, each of which creates a new block).
So here the idea morphs into letting people mine an unpopular but still reasonably expensive COIN, and taking their mined COIN and giving them GenghisCoin in the hope that you reach 51% mining power. And this looks a lot like a scam, because there's no guarantee that you'll reach 51% mining power.
Lots of reasons, Chris provided one for the actual implementation being almost impossible. But assuming it was possible and that a successful attack allowed you to plunder all the coins of a chain, then what? The attack being successful kills the value of the coins looted. No one will buy a Bitcoin from your when you can just steal it back so your plunder is worthless. And with the incentive gone the rest of it falls apart, it becomes just a way to coordinate attacks meant to destroy coins and you don't need a chain to do that.
All of these are great. But the stake pun at the end made the whole thing perfect for me.
> spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time
Read it first as if they're racing against each other, which would be an even more interesting idea. E.g. you have to get as fast as you can to some point, and your money is at stake
RandiCoin: A decentralized protocol to make and verify claims of supernatural phenomena. Users may post claims of supernatural activity at the cost of a transaction fee. Other users are then rewarded for attempts to verify or refute these claims. If the claim stands up to all scrutiny, the poster of the claim is rewarded with a significant portion of the market cap of the currency.
Banned because: Mysterious messages started appear on the blockchain that gave eerily accurate predictions of the future. The cryptographic signatures seemed to rule out every single user as being the originator of these messages. The SEC deemed this to be a form of insider trading.
CellCoin: A technology that harnesses your cells to engage in proof-of-work without requiring any computer or even conscious effort. In a feature added to spread the wealth, you can also share CellCoin with your neighbors without diminishing your own stake.
Banned because: Excessive investment in CellCoin can cause fever, respiratory distress, and (in some cases) death.
Favored by the free software foundation because of its GPL-3 license, opposed by the CDC and most large companies due to its viral nature
The question is, was it banned by the SEC, or the FDA?
The FDA tried to slow the spread, but they didn't want to actually punish people for investing in it. That was left to the SEC.
CellCoin mining requires access to the latest confirmed block, which is acquired through wireless internet. One reliable way to stop CellCoin mining in your body, along with its adverse side effects, is distancing yourself from all cellular networks.
*Insert Sexually Transmitted Disease joke*
The last line killed me :D
But I think VatiCoin is involved in BuffyCoin...
MittCoin: Mitt Romney launched his ICO at the same time as his 2024 presidential campaign, promising an executive order to make it the official currency of the United States if he wins.
Banned because: congress and senate still controlled by dems, preemptively impeached Mitt in October 2024.
Alternatively, banned because: Mitt's opponent gathered 51% of the votes fair and square, and Mitt was consequently unable to show proof of State
Preemptive impeachment! Off topic, but I’m probably the last person to realize that a person no longer needs to be a sitting president to be impeached! I’m imagining a president after election but before taking office, or from years past being impeached. Crazy to consider!
Maybe but this impeachment took place when he was in office. Only the impeachment trial is happening after his term ended. This is not the first time either.
BeefCoin: independent ranchers needed a way to finance ethically raised, grass fed cattle. Backed by proof of steak
Ether-ium: named after a character in the Book of Mormon, the latter day saints were having trouble tracking the state of their global membership across thousands of parishes (which they call Wards and Stakes), and decided to use a distributed ledger. This also simplifies the process of collecting tithing, as ten percent of the coins automatically revert to church control upon minting. To reduce chances of adversarial takeover, only church members are allowed to participate, as verified by proof of Stake.
Banned because: concerns about separation of church and state
RedCoin "reverse proof of stake": splitting your holdings of RC into N even-sized wallets increases the quantity of RC you earn by N^2-fold (for the obvious interpretation; or at least N-fold, for a flat per-wallet distribution). Not banned, just submerged by the number of wallet creations.
No, your Honour, I was not soliciting. All I did was gift this upstanding young lady a modest quantity of altcoins, backed by a smart contract such that they would lose their value unless I got laid tonight.
(does anybody else spend a weird amount of time thinking about WWII Hawaii Overprint banknotes?)
I have been toying with the idea of Vice and Virtue coins. One of the interesting things about systems like ethereum and coins built on top of it is that if a smart contract awards you a Vice coin (perhaps a non fungible token indicating that you have done some specific bad deed), there's nothing you can do to reject or pass on that coin without the smart contract letting you.
This could let you assign Vice coins that advertise someone's misdeeds, and only clear them if they acquire Virtue or purchase Indulgence coins.
...sometimes I wonder about "fitting in" at SSC. Like, Scott posts something funny, and my first impulse is to quibble with (large) bits of it. Well, maybe I'll look at what other people posted.
...oh. Guess I am in the right place.
RedCoin actually sounds pretty fun to build as a learning project. Unfortunately, I don't understand enough about regular money to understand Bitcoin; only the technical CompSci parts make something close to sense to me...
I'd bet all my coins that the Vatican would call it DrachmaCoin.
You retroactively came up with the whole article so you could fit your pun at the end, didn't you?
I award you an ExcaliburCoin because laughter is beyond measure.
Thanks for brightening our mornings!
Umanity sounds like a good thing, but probably wouldn't work in real life since computers are now getting so good at solving certain types of Captchas that they even beat humans - e.g. see the shift from the two word captchas 5 years ago to what we have now; that happened because to evade the latest bots the words had to be so convoluted that a significant amount of humans couldn't decipher them either. The pressure to automate the solving process for the Umanity captchas would be immense given the potential reward to whoever manages to crack it.
Maybe a Proof-of-Being-Too-Cool-To-Care-About-Stuff (PoBTCTCABS ?!) is what we need https://xkcd.com/1875/ instead of a Proof-of_Captcha.
BuffyCoin is just asking for Cobra effect and illegal vampire farms
CthuCoin: CthuCoin is mined by gibbering and shrieking in incomprehensible tongues which were ancient when the stars were young. Validity of this shrieking is verified in a decentralized process whereby Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, causes those who have heard his dread name to all call out in one voice that it is so, it is so, this coin bears the Name.
Banned because: when addressing concerns regarding the spontaneous flammability of the hair and eyes of professional shriekers, the head of the SEC was heard to cry 'They are here! All is woe! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn!' before promptly expiring. Though this is not strictly speaking illegal, the SEC frankly finds this to be a bit of a nuisance and is pulling rank.
The fictional systems of governance posts were some of my favorite things. So naturally, I love this too, and a LOT.
GenghisCoin is genius.
WHJCoin: Invented by the r/WSBs crowd and popular among proponents of gold-backed currencies, WHJCoin was the darling of the industry. Through a proprietary combination of GPS and Fitbit whenever an HJ is given in the parking lot of a Wendy’s a Coin is created. Coins are accepted at 7-Eleven, Super-8 Motels, and Apple Pay.
Banned because: A hedge fund manager shorted WHJCoin. The bet looked to be going well until a group of Redditors drove the price of WHJCoins sky high. The hedge fund manager had no other option – at least for this investment – but to acquire more Coins and, well, you know the rest.
Other related old posts by Scott: :)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/02/little-known-types-of-eclipse/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908033959/http://squid314.livejournal.com/331632.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908034001/http://squid314.livejournal.com/298391.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908033955/http://squid314.livejournal.com/349093.html
You fool !
Have you no idea what you have just done ?!
Has DogeCoin taught you nothing?
(EDIT : CryptoKitties, as posted by another commenter, is probably an ever better example...)
P.S.: *So* glad to not only have you back, but better than ever ! Subbed.
I think he doge'd that trap.
Charles Stross has invented something almost, but not quite, totally unlike RedCoin as a plot point in his 1999-2004 Accelerando book :
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
(Also, Ethereum : search this book for agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 )
"They pretend to pay us RedCoins, and we pretend to mine them."
hex coin hex dot com
I don't subscribe to the podcast Patreon, so I just want to give a shout-out to SolenoidEntity who clearly cracked a bit at reading the Driverify portion. :)