Erik Orrje

The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.

Bitcoin and Zcash have no utility beyond their transferability. The only way either would ever be money is if a government made it their legal tender, forcing transactions to be done with it exclusively.

To use US Dollar as an example again, the only reason it is money is that it has the alternative utility function of being the only thing the government will accept for tax payments. In that sense it is the only currency that keeps you out jail if you use it in its designated geographical area (!). If that weren’t the case then people would quickly swap to using something else—something that isn’t being manipulated by the government.

(To prevent any confusion, please understand that I believe governments should be completely agnostic to how people carry out their transactions, including allowing them to use any currency and even old-school barter if they wish.)

TL;DR The only way for the US Dollar, or Bitcoin, or Zcash (or any other unbacked currencies) to be useful as money is if a government makes them legal tender, and prohibits anything else being used in transactions.

#2411·Benjamin Davies, 4 months ago

See here. Lucas had asked:

Can you say more about why we need correspondence to make sense of the concept of self-similarity? I don't see why. And it seems to me that self-similarity is all we need to make sense of the universality of computation.

My response below. For others reading this, Erik has also since started a dedicated discussion on the topic of correspondence: https://veritula.com/discussions/is-correspondence-true-in-cr

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The FoR glossary entry on self-similarity from chapter 4 reads:

self-similarity Some parts of physical reality (such as symbols, pictures or human thoughts) resemble other parts. The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse.

The way I read that, it means the images in the planetarium correspond to the night sky. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider them similar.

From chapter 6, on the universality of computation and how “various parts of reality can resemble one another”:

The set of all behaviours and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviours and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.

That means there is one-to-one correspondence between the behaviors and responses of the first object and those of all the other objects. This is basically another way to describe the self-similarity property of the universe.

From chapter 10, in the context of mathematics (italics mine):

… the physical behaviour of the symbols corresponds to the behaviour of the abstractions they denote.

(The same is true of the physical parts of a Turing machine harnessing the self-similarity property of the universe to correspond to other physical objects.)

From chapter 14, in the context of the creation of scientific knowledge (which, AFAIK, DD views as increasing correspondence):

The creation of useful knowledge by science … must be understood as the emergence of the self-similarity that is mandated by a principle of physics, the Turing principle.

It’s been ages since I read FoR so I’m relying on word searches in the ebook but it’s full of these links between self-similarity and correspondence.

#2407·Dennis HackethalOP, 4 months ago

“Bitcoin is not backed by anything” can also be stated as “Bitcoin is not redeemable in anything”.

“POW” or “computational work” or “encryption” are not things you can redeem if you own bitcoin.

This is in contrast to gold-backed currencies, for example, which are currencies which can be redeemed in gold. The United States Federal Reserve Note only became fiat when it was no longer redeemable in gold.

#2378·Benjamin Davies revised 4 months ago

Pure genetic knowledge could colonise the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.

Deutsch disagrees. Quote:

The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution.

and quote:

The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen.

Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

#2364·Benjamin Davies revised 4 months ago

  Erik Orrje updated discussion ‘Criticisms of Zcash’.

Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge.

That doesn’t sound right to me. Can you elaborate?

#2355·Dennis Hackethal, 4 months ago

Yeah I could see some knowledge in genes corresponding to certain facts about reality, like knowledge about flight corresponding to facts about certain laws of physics.

#2347·Dennis Hackethal, 4 months ago

I think Lucas is right to reject that fragmentation but I don’t think it happens in the first place.

CR universally describes the growth of knowledge as error correction. When such error correction leads to correspondence with the facts (about the physical world), we call that science. When it doesn’t, we call it something else, like art or engineering or skill-building.

It’s all still error correction. There is no fragmentation due to correspondence.

#2340·Dennis Hackethal, 4 months ago

I think correspondence is to epistemology as adaptation is to evolution. Knowledge that corresponds more to reality tends to be more useful (and/or has more reach), similar to biological adaptation.

#2322·Benjamin Davies revised 4 months ago

  Erik Orrje updated discussion ‘Is correspondance true (in CR)?’.

The title changed from ‘Is correspondance true (in CR)?’ to ‘Is correspondence true (in CR)?’.

You say that trade-offs and scarcity are fundamental to biology. I agree, and this implies economics as a more fundamental science than biology or evolution. It still applies in our computer models, where biological details may not.

#2278·Dirk Meulenbelt, 4 months ago

I don’t think the meta algorithm is necessary for the evolution of ideas. After all, there is no meta algorithm across minds, yet ideas (memes) evolve across minds. Inside a single mind, the meta algorithm is inherited from our non-creative ancestors, where (among other things) it acted as a fail safe against erroneous behaviors.

#2275·Dennis Hackethal, 4 months ago

I currently see Constructor Theory as a meta-theory. A different mode of explanation. But it raises an interesting question: does CT actually qualify as a deeper theory than the four strands? Even if we were to express all four strands in constructor-theoretic terms, that alone wouldn’t make it explain more or have greater reach. So when would it truly deserve to be considered a strand/theory of everything?

#2258·Edwin de Wit, 4 months ago

My point is rather that it's not so clean a line between explicit and inexplicit. You're a doctor, so imagine the steps being something like:

1. Extensive description of patient's symptoms, test results, conclusion, etc, in English.
2. Same as above but mostly made out of quick notes by attending doctors and nurses.
3. Only a collection of test names and test results. Test results accompanied by Chinese.
4. Just a collection of numbers coming out of tests, without saying which test.

Arguably all the information is always there, and can be read off, but with increasing difficulty, requiring you to learn another language, or do a series of deductions.

#2256·Dirk Meulenbelt, 4 months ago

I still see epistemology as distinct, and I'll try to make my case for it. Epistemology explains how humans create explanatory knowledge — unlike biological evolution, which also produces knowledge, but not explanations. Explanatory knowledge is special because it allows us to understand the world. Deutsch even suggests that this kind of knowledge tends toward convergence — a unified theory of everything — implying a deep connection between reality and its capacity to be explained.

Economics, on the other hand, isn’t distinct in the same way. It deals with trade-offs and scarcity — principles already fundamental to biology. Life itself is about managing limited resources and the trade-offs that come with them. Evolution, in turn, discovered increasingly effective strategies for doing so — including cooperation, exchange, and other relationships between and across lifeforms that facilitate these trades.

#2261·Edwin de Wit, 4 months ago