Money – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Lagging, nagging ‘Coin feeling

Somehow, the many (?) Cassandra’s messages of late about Bitcoin being a hyped-up bubble about to burst and how it’s the laggerds (only) that now want to jump in, drive up prices but will be the Greater Fools in the game, sounds a bit … false bottom.
[Unsure what the exchange rate is, today. Has the bubble burst already, or ..?]

I’d say, how many countries, and moreover how great a many financial organisations (private or public, or regulatory or inter/supranational) may have an interest to blow up Bitcoin, as a demonstrator that all that blockchain stuff isn’t any good after all ..? Because the promise of blockchain was, and is, that it will not need any, traditionally somehow still geography-bound, standing governing body avalanched-under by politics, gross misunderstanding of the core concepts ruled over, etc. In short, power struggles.
And that, of course, may be a future that some will not allow. And fight to their deaths – inevitably, not by nature but by cause and earlier. But still they simply won’t have it, that blockchain/Bitcoin/smart-contract/whatevva shazam. With the only way to get rid of it in an inconspicuous manner, is to … inflate it till it goes borsht. Risk, but possibly profit hugely during the trip ..? Case in point: this one [hope the link is still valid, and it’s in Dutch which may mix semantic levels to be tauto]

Plus:
[You get a golden bullet-like thing on your pillow. With compliments and filled with chocolate, that is… In Salzburg of course]

Simply laborious

After some post recently, I was triggered to summarise – and expand …
Since there is a bit of history missing. Being the Theory of Firm. Which is, among other stuff but au fond, about the creation of the manager. As the go-between of ’employees’, as the go-between between the workforce and Capital. As the foreman, the one in charge of coordination – when the people come together because they can achieve more in cooperation than the sum of their individual efforts, through specialisation of labour, those specialised contributions need coming together in one way or another, and the provider of capital (the thing that other raw materials are paid with hence the about-only thing to receive deferred payment; don’t get me started on the so absolute quod-non of the ‘inherent right’ to rent above trivial liquidity and risk compensation…) will want to talk to just one. Originally, sometimes capital provider and leader/cooperation-initiator/manager were one, until external capital was required from parties that extorted control. Big sic there.
Well, now don’t go blaming me that it is on the capital provider side that criminally biased rules and regulations have crept in. Flash capital, extortionist locust ‘capital management’ groups, et al., have forced their mob ways into ‘normal’ conduct — almost; the Rheinland model [first, learn to pronounce that correctly, then, get to understand it fully, then, return and prostate and happily receive your life sentences for your transgressions] still holds sway, and sometimes veers back a bit. A bit.

So yes, to the latter, that is criminal, and the cause of cushions called management layers, ever more wrongly devised and developed. And yes, we would need some totalitarian revision of organisational structures to cure it all. Including, starting with, the redefinition [i.e., throwing away all that function there smoothly now, as they denounce their incapacity to really do what’s really required] of middle management and refilling the positions. Also capping CEO pay to, say, something like 10 times the average pay of the bottom 10% of the workforce. All contribute, and a CEO may need a little compensation for when [not if; should be law..!] something goes wrong, his (sic) head rolls. But not too much. When the CEO is sacrificed, something went so wrong that many will get hit; the CEO being in the best position to survive it, qua social and economic strata he should be in. Workers, much less so; much less opportunity to have built buffers, capice?

But maybe not absolute only Owners and Professionals. That will simply not work. Both sides would, even in an ideal world of perfect information everywhere, be buried under control information to the mountainous levels that they wouldn’t have time left [if you’d need more than 25 hours a day to do your work, just work that little longer!] to do their primary jobs…
But a revisit of Galbraith’ four information processing capacity increasing routes, as here, is desperately necessary… Surely, herein lies the way forward to much better organisational design, integrating the latest of possibilities qua information processing and internal and external networking, making possible the creation of true networked organisations and individuals…?

Oh, and:
[Completely undoctored, also unsmoked, pic from Toronto]

Surge ethiconomics

There was already quite some debate about surge pricing, in particular re [illegal] taxi services.
What I missed so far, are discussions about the economic or raher ethical character of abusing surges and their price tag instabilities. Like, how would you depict such developments in price elasticity graphs; shooting up and down on-curve, and curve shifts included. Is orderly society permissive of such hog cycle disruptions ..? [Term pointing at the characterisation of the CEOs that not want to see anything in/human in what they do]
The asymmetry (shooting) on the curve, is market imperfection; the curve shifts in the long run, are better captured by ‘classical’ economics. Again: the ethical ramifications aren’t value-free (tauto), aren’t of uninterest to anyone that values freedom — as that requires markets to function, which is done by regulating them. The latter is proven so many times I don’t even want to discuss it here.

Stock markets, and stocks, are capped qua max change (volatility spikes), the most extreme competitive markets out there;
why wouldn’t other markets have the same ..?

Your contributions in comments, please… Plus:

[Stable, safe, cleared for use; Madrid]

The end of blockchains ..?

Some thought on where ‘money’ is going.

On the one hand, there will still be the fear that the ultimate-spread of blockchain’s control could quite easily devolve into coalitions and cliques, if not worse, when the heavyweights out there put their (computing) power to it — and what damage would quantum computing do, or could that (be made to …!?) turn the tables in the absolute opposite direction ..?
We’d be back at square one, with the general public having to trust some ‘trusted’ third party/parties and how dismal is what we have produced in terms of ‘governments’ through the ages. Or, in the opposition, trust nirvana nears ..?

On the other hand, we have the (d!)evolution of money through the ages already, when after barter trade money was introduced as neutral intermediary — in the form of value-preserving, rare hence very difficult to (re)produce and hopefully hard to fake goods like gold. Then, we switched to more abstract money media, with an intellectual exchange-ability to back to gold through the gold standard. Then, even further off, that link was released and we ended up with thin air as cover for our ‘money’ as it stands today. The cover, convertibility, is some vague notion of some abstract constructs (and as said, very often failed before or slowly is, as we write) like ‘the government’ that would repay all ‘money’ lost with … drum roll … ‘money’!
And, with blockchain technology and trust, we’re moving even further off. Combine this with Graeber’s Debt, and we have an even thinner notion of where we are and are going with the whole concept. ‘Money’ being no zero-sum game as it is created by (almost) full-sum net debt increase to start with. No wonder other initiatives spring up, time and time again following the latest possibilities created by, e.g., decreases in transaction costs (including agency theory style) by the birth of the Internet. All focused on Trust in one way or another, to do business in order to satisfy one’s Maslovian needs. (Or not; see some previous posts e.g. here.)

Well, I’ll leave you to consider your sins, with:
20150911_173935
[Sheltering under bare money-making, for fun; Amsterdam]

Gininflation ..!?

The title not referring to a rise in consumption of some derivative beverage (jenever being the real deal of course!), but a conflation of Gini and inflation.

Because it just won’t leave my mind that some form of inequality (change) index might be derived from a clever combination of regular inflation rates (the real ones, not the pure phantasies ponied up by governments!) with both the Gini income and wealth indices. As this would amplify that inflation may hit classes that can hardly avoid it harder, and classes that wouldn’t care much, less. Or the other way around. Or so. Driving out money supply through capturing where the hoarding of that new money takes place.
Finally exposing the spiraling inflation in the Euro zone, too, that officially didn’t exist after Doomsday struck (Feb 2002) but all but the most foolhardy delusional (bordering on ? utter incompetence) knew and know better. Coinciding with the mortgage / derivatives bubbles.

But it takes some careful crafting to combine inflation (which one?) with Gini (which one?). Where my skills in the area are a bit rusty. Anyone ..?

[No razor sharp banking saved Toronto]

Hopefully, CitizenMe will be trending

This may be a trend: Decide yourself what personal data to ‘sell’, and for how much. First step: Know what you ooze out. Hopefully, through this we’ll awake and implement Jaron Lanier’s dreams…

And even before this post came out, there’s an [update] to do … With this.

And then, of course:
DSCN0088 [‘goza just like that, for no apparent quality or reason]

IoTsec as expected

Yawn. A decade of humongous growth in Information security is coming. To tackle the likes of this.
Think of where the somewhat organized, somewhat budgeted, somewhat up to it corporate world now is. (With the public organization world lagging, seriously, on all counts.) Then think of what it would take to make the general public ‘safe’.

And then think of how many InfoSec professionals would be needed. Yeay! Indeed, as in:
[Onto Val d’Orcia, as you spotted]

Judging money

[Picture’s perspective lines skewed to create akward feelings… AMS again]

@JudgeJoice_ tipped a couple of days ago about a judge with humour (in Dutch, unfortunately no English translation available). They seem to exist even in the Netherlands…

All very nice to rule that if defendant claims to not have received a loan because the bank only transferred some bits from one account to another and no ‘real’ money switched accounts (the scandal! the fraud! the defendant claimed), and hence no ‘real’ money would need to be repaid, but the defendant did all sorts of transactions with third parties where she presented the fake money (quod non) as ‘real’ herself, then the defendant would have no trouble ‘repaying’ the loan without ‘real’ money wouldn’t she?
With the court siding with the claimant (bank), heh, but coating the whole judgement with all sorts of ‘yeah, banks are Naughty not nice’ “analysis” of the situation.

By doing so, the judge came close to, on the one hand, dismissing ‘real’ money as worthless scraps of paper (mostly, to amount to anything) with only vague promises of ‘repayment’ in something that would actually be money or so: Since dropping the gold standard for <nothing>, no-one has ever explained what that would be – no, not even gold as that would be just an alternative currency with skyrocketing / flatfalling exchange rates.
And, on the other hand, the court also came close to recognition of Bitcoin et al. as sufficiently real money to count as currency. Why would some (unelected! no, you elect politicians, the administration is de facto not controlled by them) government be trusted, whereas a transparent, transparently operating self-formed community of Bitcoin much less so?

But I seem to be repeating myself re this little postlet…

Now with the addition of a court’s ruling to the same effect. Thanks, it’s official now.