Comment by majormajor
11 days ago
What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?
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The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.
It's not really wasteful if you use excess energy for mining that you couldn't store because storage is very limited.
The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.
Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.
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> But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off
Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse
Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more to survive. History shows the opposite.
> History shows the opposite.
I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way
Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"
Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel
Come on, be serious