X-Message-Number: 10879
Date: Sun, 06 Dec 1998 12:31:25 -0800
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: "I'm in the high fidelity first class travelling set ..."

George Smith writes,


>If production continues to become robotic/automatic, money will become extinct.

Since everything is free today, my friend has decided he'd like to move the
stars in their courses. Me, I like 'em just where they are. But Betelgeuse
can only go one direction, not two. We have to find a way to resolve this
conflict.

Now one way is for me to kill my friend, or him to kill me, before either of 
us can do much else. But since my friend and I don't feel much like dueling 
or warring today, we would like to use some quieter and more equitable 
system to resolve matters like this.

Now me, I like the seas to be blue. My perverse friend likes 'em green. So
we do a little swap; we barter blue seas for irregular stars. Somehow still
there's a fly in the ointment. My nextdoor neighbour has always liked blue
seas, and he's put out. Of course there's something he'd like; he'd like my
wife to do the Watussi for him every night at 8 pm.

Well, we get together and start thinking about all these little barters and
conflicts, and we think, you know what, if we had some way to allocate control
in these matters, to define a market for them, then you know what, things would
run a lot smoother. It'd sure save a lot of harsh words and violent sieges.

Now maybe a good way to resolve things would be with currency. Oh, I don't mean
that fiat-backed centrally issued bureaucratic stuff we use here in the tail
end of the 20th. I mean a kind of equitable currency, one that
controls not just private ownership but public shared resources too. If we
did that, then we could easily sort matters out without coming to blows.

Maybe this would be important on small scales too. After all, if we want
all those foglets cooperating to do laminar flow to fly us uploaded nano
gods around without cracking our heads, the foglets need some equitable 
system for resolving matters too.

In fact you already see the use of such mini-currencies in distributed 
databases and network routers, where although things are almost free it's
still a real hardship to deny someone service or force inefficient 
processing.

So it seems like money, even if only in a form something like I describe at 
http://home.connectnet.com/peter/ss.html, is going to be with us no matter
what we do. Unless perhaps the only chap left standing after the harsh words
and sieges is George Smith, who can proceed to order the universe without
needing to accomodate anyone else ...

Peter Merel.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10879