Pyramids and Blockchaining as Accidental Ideal Money Bases - jalToorey/IdealMoney GitHub Wiki

Re-visiting the Value of Religions as Highly Evolved Institutions

Ricky Gervais gives what he feels is a/the rational basis for the validity of science versus the invalidity of religion:

...science is constantly being proven over time. If we took something like any fiction, any holy book, or any other work of fiction and destroyed it, it wouldn’t come back just as it was in a thousand years. However, if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years, they’d all be back because all the same tests would yield the same results. ~ Ricky Gervais to Stephen Colbert on Science vs. Religion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5ZOwNK6n9U

This provides us an example to understand a contention Szabo might have with such an inquiry into the nature and value of religion (in comparison and contrast with science). In the essay Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth he explains how (ie Darwinian and Dawkinian) evolutionary principles imply value and truth in highly evolved traditions which carry 'intersubjective truth' using the technology of prices as an example:

Hayek's canonical example of a transient intersubjective truth is a market price. Most economists think of price in terms of value rather than "truth". But prices incorporate both objective information unknown to other subjects and the values of those subjects. In intersubjective communications, value and truth are inseparably intertwined.

Prices are an example of a technological evolution that carry information that is, 'in principle, achievable from rational thought" but that in all practicality to 'construct' prices via 'rational computation and empirical observation' would take longer than humans have available':

I argue that we should think of highly evolved tradition, what Gadamer calls "hermeneutical truths", in the same way. In one sense, they constitute a kind of "truth", since they can incorporate predictive models of the intersubjective world that are, in principle, achievable from rational thought, but in practice the rational computations and empirical observations would take longer than humans have available. In this sense it is accurate to call highly evolved tradition "truth"

God As a Metaphorical Computational Shortcut

Lacking local rational justification for particular traditions, we need to develop the kind of awe and respect for highly evolved structures that was once held for God. ~ Szabo, Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth

Religion (and other highly evolved institutions in general) thus is an 'artifact of practical usefulness' (as John Nash referred to money as!), Szabo argues, and contains valuable well justified rationality not producible by reason or individuals otherwise:

Relative to individuals, highly evolved traditions can be practically omniscient (containing much deeper information than the individual could possibly conclude from his immediate experience and reasoning), omnipresent (present throughout a culture), and omnipotent (capable of actions possible only with highly coordinated groups of people).

The idea is to map the concept of god metaphorically and treat is as a culturally held 'computational shortcut':

the divine is a brilliant metaphor for the lack of ability of a single mind to rationally understand the functions of traditions.

Re-visiting Shelling Out

Szabo's work Shelling Out extends and synthesizes Dawkin's concept of reciprocal altruism and its relation to money. Reciprocal altruism, however it forms, is a concept by which cooperative instinct evolves between non-kin (ie genetic competitors) subjects:

One of the most pertinent examples.is the vampire bat. As their name suggests, they suck the blood of prey mammals. The interesting thing is that, on a good night, they bring back a surplus; on a bad night, nothing. Their dark business is highly unpredictable. As a result, the lucky (or skilled) bats often share blood with the less lucky (or skilled) bats in their cave. They vomit up the blood and the grateful recipient eats it.

The vast majority of these recipients are kin. Out of 110 such regurgitations witnessed by the strong-stomached biologist G.S. Wilkinson, 77 were cases of mothers feeding their children, and most of the other cases also involved genetic kin. There were, however, a small number that could not be explained by kin altruism. To demonstrate these were cases of reciprocal altruism, Wilkinson combined the populations of bats from two different groups. Bats, with very rare exceptions, only fed old friends from their original group.D89(https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/#fnD89) Such cooperation requires building a long-term relationship, where partners interact often, recognize each other, and keep track of each other’s behavior. The bat cave helps constrain the bats into long-term relationships where such bonds can form.

This is a curious behavior that requires explanation especially when found between different species, because on the surface it breaks the implications of the natural result of non-cooperative (aka survival of the fittest) gene propagation. Almost on a passing comment Dawkins makes a comparison of this phenomenon to money and Szabo means to extend that framing:

We will see that some humans, too, chose highly risky and discontinuous prey items, and shared the resulting surpluses with non-kin. Indeed, they accomplished this to a far greater extent than the vampire bat. How they did so is the main subject of our essay. Dawkins suggests, “money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism”, but then pursues this fascinating idea no further. We will.

Szabo goes on to explore different institutions that provided 'intersubjective' based solutions to scaling problems humans were able to overcome through 'reciprocal altruism' between non-cooperative players that existed because of proto-money. This provides a theory and rational as to how money could come to exist as a natural non-cooperative phenomenon well before humans were able to organize and reason about something like credit in an altruistic/cooperative fashion.

Institutions involving phenomenon such as tribute, law, marriage, property rights, inheritance etc. each exemplify the value of the evolution of 'delayed reciprocal altruism' which Szabo lays out an argument for their evolutions from proto-money based protocols.

These highly evolved institutions carry intersubjective truths in which the value can be understood in hindsight (with proper and careful perspective) even though they weren't designed with rational based foresight.

On the Amortization of the Cost to Produce Otherwise Useless Artifacts

Szabo extends Menger's concept of an "intermediate commodities" (what Szabo calls "collectibles"), which are reasoned by Menger to naturally arise from non-cooperative barter, and explains how proto-money vastly scaled the concept of reciprocal altruism between otherwise competing humans:

Indeed, collectibles provided a fundamental improvement to the workings of reciprocal altruism, allowing humans to cooperate in ways unavailable to other species. For them, reciprocal altruism is severely limited by unreliable memory. Some other species have large brains, build their own homes, or make and use tools. No other species has produced such an improvement to the workings of reciprocal altruism.

He presents the theory that when commodities serve as collectibles their (perhaps otherwise wasteful) production can evolve to be at pure cost paid by the amortized value of the transactions they provide:

At first, the production of a commodity simply because it is costly seems quite wasteful. However, the unforgeably costly commodity repeatedly adds value by enabling beneficial wealth transfers. More of the cost is recouped every time a transaction is made possible or made less expensive. The cost, initially a complete waste, is amortized over many transactions.

Re-visiting Blockchains and Social Scalability

In Szabo's piece Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability Szabo explains that Bitcoin's value is not found in the efficiency of its design:

The secret to Bitcoin’s success is certainly not its computational efficiency or its scalability in the consumption of resources. Specialized Bitcoin hardware is designed by highly paid experts to perform only one particular function—to repetitively solve a very specific and intentionally very expensive kind of computational puzzle.

Instead he argues that Bitcoin's computational INNEFICIENCY provides another example, like proto-money collectibles, of social scalability:

Instead, the secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability.

Our work attempts to extend such a claim and show that Bitcoin re-solves the different prices planes among currency areas thus capturing the value in Nash's observation that:

there is a tremendous value in simply having prices quoted conveniently.

This is done in effect by the same template in which the first 'intermediate commodities' provided Metcalfe factor scaling solutions to prices as Szabo describes here (from Shelling Out):

A related problem is that, as engineers would say, barter “doesn’t scale”. Barter works well at small volumes but becomes increasingly costly at large volumes, until it becomes too costly to be worth the effort. If there are n goods and services to be traded, a barter market requires n^2 prices. Five products would require twenty-five prices, which is not too bad, but 500 products would require 250,000 prices, which is far beyond what is practical for one person to keep track of. With money, there are only n prices – 500 products, 500 prices. Money for this purpose can work either as a medium of exchange or simply as a standard of value – as long as the number of money prices themselves do not grow too large to memorize or change too often

We argue that Bitcoin will catalyze the market valuation of the major global currencies to converge to a single pricing field in the same manner an intermediate commodity does.

On Supra-Rationality and Humanity's Apparent Pyramid Building Nature

This framing with respect to Szabo's suggestions on how to traverse intersubjective truths (to tease out their value) provides what we feel is a useful perspective for understanding humans apparent pyramid building nature. It is useful not only for understanding how humanity evolved but for also considering how it should continue to evolve. This type of reasoning marks quite a technological advance for mankind as we begin to extrapolate from natural and unconceived implementations to perhaps then reimplement such designs using reason.

That is to say solutions to problems that were far out of individual based reasoning can now be compartmentalized into useful tools and information for the present and future.

On Accidental Production of Valuable (But Otherwise Useless) Collectibles

Our extension of Mises Regression Theorem with Games as Pre-Market Commodity Valuators provides the possibility of the natural selection of 'collectibles' via the existence of an otherwise un-useful commodity as biproducts or waste of production of otherwise useful commodities.

A simple example could be children creating collectible driven games with shells that are waste from eating.

Humans as Pyramid Builders

In "Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth" Szabo asks:

What are the proper methods for critiquing traditions related to interpersonal behavior?

Here we mean to frame our inquiry into the apparent human nature of pyramid building to tease out a useful comparison with Bitcoin and the concept of it's blockchain. It's said all over the world throughout our history there are examples of humans leaving pyramids as artifacts of great civilizations. We mean to paint pyramid building as an extension of the creation of shell money from collectible shell game.

We want to suggest that pyramids provide social scalability by linking economies through a single pricing system, thus amortizing value into the otherwise pure costly production of pyramid blocks. Then if we can provide a reasonable path for the non-cooperative evolution of pyramids as an evolved institution of reciprocal altruism we feel we have a reasonable theory for investigation that might propagate and help us understood our own past and future evolution.

Pyramids Wrapping Proto-Pyramids and Other Capacitive Institutions

We previously invoked the concept of 'wrapping' (and provided syntax for it) to metaphorically represent complexity distance between intersubjective truths or institutions:

That humans create stockpiles of whatever they used to survive on a cooperative level is fully founded. The issue is why and how money arose, and also when and how markets arose, and what relationship each of the two have in their respective inquiries.

Metaphorically at least, to birth money by wrapping a silo of grain, is to create a credit system using numbers based on the rice stored.

Wrapping in this sense allows the concept of tangential transformation of stored social energy:

newCreditSystem{previouslystoredCommodity}

Imagine for example a religious meme held by a peoples that thus believe they MUST protect a special religious site, who therefore gain by the scaling solution such a consensus would provide:

newConcensusBasedOnPreservingOldSystem{oldSystem}

This concept of wrapping purposefully maps well also to the idea of preserving a previous and archaic pyramid attempt with another perhaps more secure and/or useful pyramid or building.

Humans as Blockchainers

Although these concepts don't NECESSARILY usefully compare we feel its useful to consider the concept of a blockchain with respect to the laying of pyramid blocks. Consider Satoshi's explanation/introduction of Bitcoin's blockchain:

...we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it.

This concept resonates with our present day amazement of the fittingess of pyramid blocks around the world, however, from our Szabonian inquiry we are noting the VALUE of the implementation of 'the next block must fit to the previous block' from non-efficient scalability providing technology (as opposed to most peoples' attempt to assert and concentrate on the apparently lost stone cutting technology).

On The Amortization of Otherwise Inefficient and Wasteful Bitcoin Block Production

By Szabo's account of the usefulness of the production of (the perhaps) otherwise not useful collectible commodities we see that unit's of bitcoin capture the value of the transactional efficiency the network provides its users.

On the Reliability of The Mean Production of Bitcoin Blocks

In a previous essay we noted the reliability of blocktime production from Satoshi's implementation as a basis for the valuation and amortization of production cost of Bitcoin units (this allowed us to map and declare them as Nash's definition of Ideal Money):

Bitgold with a process control solution does render Bitgold to have a similar characteristic that Bitcoin has with the difficulty adjustment algorithm. Bitcoin has much more complex stages of evolution, however, here we mean to call attention to the concept of mean block time that is the effect of the difficulty adjustment algorithm that Satoshi implemented with Bitcoin.

We have already noted that Bitcoin as a low cost settlement medium would imply convergence of competitive valuation of major currencies should Bitcoin become a significant player on the global scale. Furthermore and finally, we make the observation, ergo, units of Bitcoin as an extension of, or produced in relation to, the asymptotically Ideal and constant supply rate of blocks, are then and thus themselves by Nash’s definition, Ideal Money.

However we can think about the usefulness of the reliability of a mean block time in a different sense, allowing Bitcoin to be viewed as a byproduct of block time reliability (the following are from Ideal Money):

Our view is that if it is viewed scientifically and rationally (which is psychologically difficult!) that money should have the function of a standard of measurement and thus that it should become comparable to the watt or the hour or a degree of temperature. And money, as an efficient practical means of transferring utility, naturally links directly with the game theoretic idea of “TU games” (games with transferable utility).

In connection with this particular version of the text of our lecture/paper on ideal values in connection with money (or currencies) we would like to remark on an analogy relevant to science, technology, and culture on a global level. Consider "the metric system", with its headquarters located in a suburb of Paris. This plays a big role in facilitating the precise definition of measures for electronic hardware components and also for medical measures of various types. (In the USA we can still get along well with MPH velocities and comfortably measure temperatures more finely with Fahrenheit.) What I want to REMARK UPON, in relation to the units of this system is that "inflation is NOT in fashion". Thus, in terms of our use of physical measures, we DO NOT want that the “length of the king’s foot” should shrink, from one reign to another, etc., etc.

Here, evidently, politicians in control of the authority behind standards COULD corrupt the continuity of a good standard, but depending on how things were fundamentally arranged, the probabilities of serious damage through "political corruption" might become as small as the probabilities that the values of the standard meter and kilogram will be corrupted through the actions of politicians.

A concept that we thought of later than at the time of developing our first ideas about Ideal Money is that of the importance of the comparative quality of the money used in an economic society to the possible precision, as an indicator of quality, of the contracts for performances of future contractual obligations.

Our Observation

This framing of the relationship of reliable mean block production (aka highly evolved human customs for competitive block production etc) suggests that Ideal Money could have been produced as an accidental byproduct to mining for other reasons. Thus giving a possible explanation as to how gold became a highly prized money but without asserting a non-monetary usefuless as the reason to produce or mine blocks for it.

This framing also suggests what the long lost technology was or rather suggests that pyramids were a scaling technology built without our understanding of their usefulness from a rational/proximal perspective.

Sometimes people like to suggest the great pyramids were some kind of advanced technology such as an engine or an electrical generation machine. Here we find then our wrapping framework and syntax works well to express Szabo's work and extend his theories to pyramid building and we leave as an example:

generators/motors{pyramidsAndBlockchains{socialScalabilityInstitutions}}

We can now view the scalability of the consensus provided by pyramid building separately from the direct economic cost involved in the production of their blocks and sperate from any concepts of proximal foresight or reason for their usefulness. From this viewpoint the intricacies and precision involved are as much derived from the scalability and consensus they provide as would be thought to be the other way around and their existence so many years later a product of these advancements rather than intention.

This observation provides contrast to Gervais-to view highly evolved and survived intersubjective truths ie religion as yet to be decoded irreplaceable useful information which could be lost and unfortunately only brute force replaced over time ie not derivable from reason and/or experiment.