Illustrations by Emily Wright
"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." -Blaise Pascal
Currency is man's imitation of nature. We place value what we think good, a fact somewhat askew because currency, like the objects of value, can literally be anything; and, we buy rarely based on the best of habits.
In a perfect world, our habits would lead us to the greatest happiness for all. We don't see this in our world, so so much for our utilitarian dreams.
The weakness of human desire causes us to consider social contracts: we give up several of our Rights and leave them to a higher Authority for the purpose of controlling ourselves. We choose to obey because of selfish advantages of being in society. As Hobbes said, a man without this central Authority lives a life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The idea of the social contract also appears in the writing of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and is still popular in some circles. Several pre-Socratic philosophers (masters of pure reason) arrived at precursors to Hobbesian notions.
From the perspective of cultural advancement, these notions may need to be seriously looked at. We take it as assumed that a man that doesn't labour is a mooch, even if that labour is completely useless. We may have above all our heads those infinitely ironic words: "work is freedom".
For every thought, there is a what if. So: what is the alternative?
Let's take Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as a marker at the gate to Enlightened Principles. He introduced ideas like Gross National Product, Productivity, Supply and Demand, and Labour and Capital. He cared about the wealth of the poorest class of people, as though capitalist principles are sufficient to ensure the greatest wealth distribution.
The telling question we must all answer is this: "should governments intervene in our markets?"
Is there an invisible hand guiding free market ethics?
I believe that we will see a new answer to this coming within the next few years, as the conversation about capital introduces a new layer to the architecture of trade. Even ebay suffers from a weakness in the system: it requires trust to function.
The new economics is trust-free, and that makes all the difference.
As Adam Smith said: "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence... but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the by the natural course of things."
So: government interference in the economy is not the most effective way to get good results.
As to the question of whether or not work is freedom, Adam Smith had this to say: "The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition... is so powerful, that it is alone.... capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity."
In other words, work is the natural condition of man. It is not demeaning.
If the idea of cryptocurrency is a good one, may we borrow the words from the mouth of Confucius: "The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." -Confucius
This small stone is called "the twilight of trust".
But even this thought comes with it a what if. Who controls our rights? Can we ever give up our rights, or force the removal of rights to an individual? Is a social contract necessary? Are there several Inalienable Rights that must always be protected by a sovereign force if necessary?
Robert Nozick, in defense of anarchy, would argue that there is to be no government larger than the minimum required for protection of rights. The government protects us from force, theft, and fraud, and enforces contracts.
With the information age, we have discovered that many things that would traditionally be considered theft or piracy are in no way protected. At our thumb tips, we have the largest library of sounds, images, videos, and writings ever collected. And soon enough, this will also prove to be the most stable library ever devised, as all transactions over the Pangalactic library will be contained in all computers that access it.
So, I do not believe that Inalienable Rights, such as professed by Nozick, are even possible to protect. We may have to find new ways to attribute our cultural legacy to the right people -- in many cases, who is willing to pay.
There are already experimental currencies being developed that permanently affix a work's attribution to the correct artist. An artist may make it impossible for anyone to view their work without a special key, a key that is created for free at the creation of the file. As well, many videos that are completely free on the internet are still purchased over Netflix and other such information media. As long as the cost isn't prohibitive, people are willing to pay.
Although theft may not be the easiest right to be protected, there are still forms of psychological violence that occurs over the Internet. Bullies can cause suicide through their words; something like that is a violation of Inalienable Rights, which in this case means that it should be punished by a sovereign authority.
This small stone is called "government begins at violence".
Or, in the words of Aristotle: "The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life."
We are ultimately in control: it is a conscious decision to partake in the social contract and respect the rights of others. In our imaginations, we can see what is best, and what is a poor substitute for the best.
Sometimes, our imagination is still not enough; only practice and experimentation give us an accurate picture. There are, for instance, several cryptocurrencies currently vying for power over the new frontiers of economic theory. Since all the data from all these experiments is open source, there is a strong need for each to be as stable as possible. The most popular cryptocurrency is the Bitcoin.
As I said, Bitcoin works, as opposed to traditional currencies, on a trust-free system. This is the essential difference. You don't need to know who you are trading with. There is no central bank, but a bunch of nodes composed of all the thousands of people presently making BTC transactions. Everything is transparent.
What this means is that someone can borrow the Bitcoin architecture to make a fully-functional competing currency. One example of this is the INK architecture. Purpose-built by Eric Martindale to make vast improvements to aging code, it will leverage the potential of large discussion forums to, for instance, allow for content-creators to get paid for their efforts. There are enough side-efforts to keep this project fresh for years.
And for everyone who thinks of some improvement they can make to the global library:
"Every man... is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty (for which) no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people." -Adam Smith
