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Justificationism
The mistaken philosophical tradition holding that knowledge must be "justified" (i.e., proven, supported, or made probable) by appealing to an ultimate, infallible authority. Critical Rationalism identifies this entire approach as logically untenable, as any demand for justification leads to an inescapable logical trap known as the Münchhausen Trilemma: either an infinite regress (every justification needs a justification), circularity (the belief justifies itself), or dogmatism (the justification stops at a "self-evident" belief). Critical Rationalism is a non-justificationist philosophy; it rejects the entire quest for justified, certain foundations and replaces it with an emphasis on criticism and error correction.
Historicism
The mistaken belief that history is governed by discoverable, large-scale "laws of history" or "powerful historical trends". This belief leads to the idea of unconditional historical prophecy, which is anti-rational and politically disastrous, as seen in the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. It is contrasted with the "piecemeal" method of making specific, conditional predictions.
This could lead to a cool knowledge graph feature down the line, where users could see how ideas might relate across discussions, and which ideas are referred to the most.
Idea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.
Dennis suggested I create this discussion and tag @dirk-meulenbelt and @darren-wiebe.
Logan Chipkin has also suggested I get in contact with @darren-wiebe in regards to putting together a CR encyclopedia or something of the sort.
I think it is worth noting that I am much more excited to publish standalone articles than to drop top-level ideas into discussion topics.
I am not marking this as a criticism, as my personal desires in this respect may be irrelevant to the goals of Veritula.
See #2777.
While it is true that discussions don’t restrict people from posting long-form content like what is on the ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ discussion, that is not the intuitive function of a discussion thread. I believe the long-form content in that discussion is much more natural to an article format.
If a goal of Veritula is for it to eventually be widely used, it should cater to at least some of what people are used to. The articles and encyclopedia formats are the most standard way for high-level information to be presented in written form, and internet users expect different kinds of content in articles vs discussions.
I used to think that articles would need to be grouped in some way, but I no longer think so. Articles will often compete, even if they aren’t about the same or even similar topic.
E.g. an article ‘Easy-to-Vary Explanations’ would compete with an article ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’
Users would be able to point out and connect conflicting articles, but that wouldn’t cause them to be connected by topic, but rather by conflict.
Would ideas that no longer have pending criticisms (perhaps because the criticism chain has been flipped further down) be pulled out of the archive?
‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.
It might make sense to have the new top-level idea form at the top, in the meantime. Compared to the current design, this would invite the creation of more top-level ideas.
Any progress on this? Scrolling to the bottom to submit new ideas is annoying.
The site isn’t at all big enough for this to matter yet.
I don’t deny that Zcash might be decentralised and private.
For Zcash to become the next money, it is not sufficient for it to just be durable, fungible, private, decentralised, etc.
As long as it doesn’t have any underlying value, it will not be suitable as money.
You are using secondary attributes of good money as positive justifications for Zcash as good money, but you are failing to answer the criticism that Zcash has no underlying value.
We don’t need to take ‘good vs bad’ to be the only meaningful dichotomy for the idea to stand, so Edwin’s idea is not important to the argument.
Supply: A limited supply (scarcity) may increase the value.
The scarcity of a useless thing doesn’t make it less useless.
Yes, that was what I was thinking. Presumably the OP could set their own deadline timeframe too.
Utility is not a necessary aspect of money.
Money without other use cases only holds value to the degree it can continuously win a Keynesian Beauty Contest in the market.
In other words, it has no underlying value.
The price of a commodity and the quantity of it in use don’t strictly correlate in the way you suggest here. 50% of gold being tied up in industry, jewellery, etc. does not mean the price floor is at 50% of the current price.
By the standard you have set here, you have implicitly disqualified Bitcoin and Zcash. If gold is not good enough because it could fall to its price floor (your claim being 50%), then Bitcoin and Zcash are even worse because they have no floor at all. It might be more precise to say the floor is zero.
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.