The Relevance And Significance of the works "Ideal Money" to Bitcoin

The Relevance And Significance of the works "Ideal Money" to Bitcoin

I will use this thread as a dialogue and inquiry for those that are sincere in wanting to understand the works entitled Ideal Money which is, in summary, 20 years of lectures and writings on the subject of the advent of an international e-currency with a stable supply and the game theoretical implications it will have the world.

But as with any brilliant and complex ideas and discoveries there is a long journey to understand the reasoning. It takes time, and its well known with Nash's other work that there is incredibly subtle nuance to his thinking.

He also left a clear memo that he was obfuscating the meaning of his words for fear of government reprisal:

[QUOTE=memo]" The script or plan for my talk linking the "ideal money" with the choices and actions of "thrift" or "savings" by persons or by "economic agents" was influenced by concerns that it would be wise not to speak too incautiously of "the Keynesians" when the times are such that massive public opinions may be supporting actions by which a state administration can act without going through the parliamentary processes to write new legislation. So in the rush of political campaigns and elections (for example in the USA) it is difficult to sell a national monetary policy which, if followed consistently on a "long run" level, would result in the specific nation state existing as if on a higher level of economic civilization. (For example, Sweden and Argentina might be usable, over a long time comparison, to represent comparable "economic civilizations".) Therefore, I had arranged for 2012 to talk more cautiously in relation to whatever would impact with "the Keynesians" and with the political interests relating also to the scholarly factions allied with (or forming) "the Keynesians". And this caution carries over naturally to 2013 also. "[/QUOTE]

The first quote I think that is most important to read in order to begin to traverse the argument is this one:

[QUOTE=Ideal Money]"The ultimately launched concept of "Ideal Money" became possible when I conceived of a practical basis for a standardization of the comparison of the value of the currency with an appropriate standard or ideal. And the key to that was the idea of an ICPI or (international) "Industrial Consumption Price Index".[/QUOTE]

The concept of the ICPI is not perfectly new. George Selgin and many others have said of Nash's proposal:


But we can clearly understand through Nash's words that Selgin has missed understood the role and purpose of the ICPI in the proposal:

[QUOTE=Ideal Money]It seems possible and not unlikely, however, that if two states evolve towards having currencies of more stable value as measured locally by national CPI indices that then also these distinct currencies would tend to evolve towards more stable comparative relations of value.

Then the limiting or “asymptotic” result of such an evolutionary trend would be in effect “ideal money” but this as a result achieved without the adoption of anything like an ICPI index as a basis for the standard of value.[/QUOTE]

This is why the previous quote is important to understand, it is by constructing a theoretical ideal, that allows us to extrapolate and implementable project.

23 June 2021 at 10:41 PM
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Earlier posts are available on our legacy forum HERE

Money I think is the primary intersubjective truth. I think it connects us better and more importantly than we realize (ie I think we forget almost everyone uses it.).

When tribes different so vastly their money systems and languages don't connect its like clashing universes, they can't but fight to the destruction of one.

But eventually a single system (but multiple currencies!) wins out and brings order and cooperative gain to otherwise non-cooperative entities. Its not to have one money. Its to have a single system of order. Either are the same in this sense, of course to have only one money is to have a single system, but that doesn't address the problem of today's fragmented global economy.

Here we want to note how the significance of something like bitcoin lies not at all in connecting the average citizens with each other via transactions but rather about the global settlement between superpowers in conflict.

We want to re-orientate to see the importance in addressing the problem of needing to move to a single monetary order and understand and discuss the game theory behind it.


the false bitcoiner narrative that we must fight against our states control. But don't we really want our nation to be able to defend itself via other central banking competitors? Then central banking is important and good.

Do we use central banking and inflation to fund war? Then its a defense mechanism if needed isn't it?

What happens when we get mature and look at the game theory from a balanced perspective not a moronic one?


Image a time and tribes/civilizations at war. And the economy of creating arrow heads and the game of shooting arrows at your enemy and the game of reverse engineering the best arrow heads. Securing the best quarries for the best weapon materials and the types of metals that are accidental biproducts of the arms race...

The division and specialization of labor.

and then one day, or some time, there is peace between the tribes.

What should happen with the arrow heads?


Broken YouTube Link

I'll never understand why this is off topic but anyways....

people need to understand what is going on.


No they don’t. The more misunderstandings the more easily they are manipulated. To your own benefit.


by Zeno k

No they don’t. The more misunderstandings the more easily they are manipulated. To your own benefit.

Do you mean like... immutable merge with order?

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Blockchains Language and Intersubjective Truth

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I’ve written about frameworks already and I feel the concept of them is the key to great human advancement. I feel this even more so after re-traversing Smith’s Toms which is starting to seem to be to be a piece that illuminates the general concept of the effects of frameworks (or lenses).

I’m also interested in relating Toms with LLM technology but also through studies of language theory. Although, my initial and quick intro to language theory and notably Chomsky’s lecture suggests that the concepts of LLMs and language theory are not very related at least on a surface level.

I’m still catching up on the concept of language theory but in the meantime I’m fixated on the concept of recursion he refers to that seems to be a necessary primitive of the formation of our species’ natural ability to learn and use language. As it relates to set theory I think maybe it relates to the emerging money technology bitcoin via the concept called a blockchain (here it is coincidentally quite relevant that it is specifically a reference to bitcoin’s blockchain and not the concept one might think could be thought of in general).

Chomksy seems to be looking for an explanation as to how we developed the universal grammar technology referred to as merge as well as an explanation as to how it came about so recently in our history. And that it came about so recently in our history means it was not a genetic advancement but something that came from what we already evolved to have for other reasons.

Here I am thinking about how the blockchain is a specific version of merge that is immutable and ordered, thus, immutable merge with order.

This observation would self-satisfy the question of why the extra complexity in an otherwise minimalist system. And then it would follow that from some external technology in which we socially perform ‘immutable merge with order’ (ie pyramid building) extends our contract technology (which is implicit for scaling etc).

TOMS gives us a framework from which to understand how our internal thoughts affect our reaction to external stimuli. Through his inquiry we learn to question who is the individual being considered, who are the external actors or agents, and what is the relationship etc. Later I mean to provide some ideas for a formal syntax for frameworks/lenses to this regard and we can have some general understanding through philosophy.

Framework is a trick aspect however and most of our energy should probably be spent understanding the pitfalls of frameworks and lenses.

We are learning we are a product of natural evolution, however, we recently had a deep devotion (and literature) developed to a certain kind of framework of deity whoreshipping (here it's probably easier to think of it as judaic-christian even though that won’t perfectly apply to every reader’s family and ancestry etc.).

And now science is teaching us that many of our beliefs can be shown to not stand up to the perceivable truths of nature.

But we get confused when trying to bury the lies of religions forgetting that religion is what survived us. It was the technology that allowed us to scale socially and survive the unpredictability of the elements. To become what we are, to have what we have.

Before science, logic, reason, organized religion, as antithetical to the truth of nature as it was, ruled man in all ways.

On the Division and Specialization of Labor

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Milton Friedman explains the amazing amount of work that goes into simply making pencil. In order to do this a society must be able to divide and specialize its labor. This is what Adam Smith expounds on in TWON. If everyone is to do every task then there can be no time to make a pencil AND prepare one’s dinner (after hunting for it once finished crafting a bow).

A society then must be sufficiently diverse, scaled, to have certain technology that requires such specialization.

Szabo talks about formalized complexity in this regard. Our theory then is humans reach scalability limitations until they develop certain technologies. Since humans require the same things, as they are all humans, these technologies share classes (ie water, food, etc.).

We can think of the level a society reaches when they can support commerce by sea/ocean and the special financial technologies necessary to carry the commerce abroad.

The Libertarian Framework

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Szabo explains the value of the evolved complexity that is implied in the institutions we have evolved. The libertarian doesn’t see this value. The libertarian thinks from the individual framework and doesn’t balance that framework with their connection to the greater nation, nor the greater global economy.

Central Banks are necessary firms of nations. But we can align them, improve them as they are.

Money as a Shared Intersubjective Truth
I've written before on the Nakamoto consensus and how it seems to imply, if we were to consider a simulation model of the universe that probability is intrinsic in the fabric of such a universe (as much as encryption is intrinsic in privacy technology/communication). If we consider the implicit concept of immutable merge with order as the beginning of the explosion for language we can then also think of counting as being the first intersubjective truth (the implication being we did start naturally counting together through accounting). So it wasn’t that we discovered numbers but we started ordering together.

The key points being this would require both work and consensus.

And thus we should be thinking about this even in set theory. That order requires work. Or at least understand this is a thermodynamic consideration. Then of course as a corollary we can say that immutability implies consensus or ie its socially held (social force holds it).

Smith talks about the impartial observer or the person in the breast. I’m not ready to give insights on TOMS yet but money being a precursor to language and our first shared intersubjective truth lends to the idea of having the concept of a perfect being one looks to that guides one without the concept of a society necessarily existing. Smith illuminates our ability to sympathize through a process of induction, whether we internalize and mirror an affliction we witness with regard to a fellow being. This ability is remarkable. The suggestion here is that it also came before language (although I am still to study the concept of I-language).

Re-Orientating Bitcoin Maximalism

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Hayek teaches us the importance of prices. Through Selgin’s work on free banking theory, Hayek's considerations on the denationalization of money, and the theoretical framework/equilibrium for Ideal Money Nash gives us, we can understand how our money system can be arranged, with coordination via bitcoin’s respective exchange price, to optimize our major currencies to ultimately signify a global pricing system.

This global pricing system would mark the attainment of a new global intersubjective truth. As if we, as a global civilization, learned to count together for the first time. We would think about it and feel about it as a new framework, where the pricing system aligns moral sentiments such that we act like a global ‘quantum-like’ computer where each of the individuals has full knowledge and information of what they are doing and need to do in relation to each other individual (since the pricing system, our money systems in Ideal state, would guide them optimally by the Hayek definition etc).

It was thus for the petty ape then of that Satoshi necessarily designed bitcoin to be like gold in the eyes of ****-economicus.

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