Pierre's logs

levers for change + all things sustainable

In the next year you’ll hear about people in casinos in Vegas buying and sell #bitcoins for cash and casino chips

Bitcoins in Real Life
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In the next year you’ll hear about people in casinos in Vegas buying and sell bitcoins for cash and casino chips.

Imagine a bachelor party comes to Vegas and STNY (someone that’s not you) gives $550 to a guy at a bar and he takes out his laptop or tablet and ships 100 bitcoins to STNY’s phone. STNY then goes to Craigslist and ships some bitcoins to an escort and a drug dealer, who then show up in person to provide goods and services.


The Drug Underground and Bitcoin
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Last month folks were buzzing about an online drug marketplace called SilkRoadMarket, which was reportedly trading in, well, all kinds of drugs: marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy and DMT.

Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.   


Let’s Make Some Predictions
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We are 100% certain that governments will start banning bitcoins in the next 12 to 18 months. Additionally, we’re certain bitcoins will soar in value and a crush of folks will flood the system and start using them.

Currently there are 6M coins at $6.70 each for a total economy of about $40M. Bitcoin speculation and hoarding will also cause a massive spike in bitcoin value. For example, if 10M people find out about bitcoins in the next year and want to buy $100 worth, $1B will be infused into the bitcoin economy.

Finally, there will be massive breakage in bitcoins. If your laptop crashes and you didn’t back up your bitcoins, well, you’re SOL. If someone steals you laptop that has 10,000 bitcoins on it you won on Bitcoin Poker, you’re SOL. Lost your USB drive with 500 bitcoins on it after a night out on the town? You’re SOL.

Sites like 99designs, eLance and oDesk will start accepting bitcoins for payment. If they don’t, they will face competition from folks who do.

Bottom line: The world is going to be turned over by bitcoins unless governments step in and ban them by prosecuting individuals.

This is about to get really interesting, everyone.

via launch.is

The idea that bonuses could disappear, as the authorities wish, is seen as a joke in the City

Bonuses have been inflated by a poaching war as firms that have survived in good shape, such as Barclays, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, snaffle top talent. Typically, they are hiring rainmakers on one-year guaranteed deals, with the highest earners in line for between $1 million or $2 million, regardless of whether they generate any business.

This is a far cry from the boom years when the same people could expect to earn five times that but the packages will still be seen as excessive when banks are under pressure to scrap large bonuses. It's no different from Premiership football where those who score goals command the most. Those in the "Ronaldo" category, making recent moves include Basil Geoghegan, who left Goldman for Deutsche Bank, Jonathan Grundy, who joined Credit Suisse from Merrill Lynch, and Jim Renwick, whom Barclays Capital poached from UBS.

Not to be caught out, victims of these poaching raids are responding by handing out retention bonuses - one or two-year deals to hold onto staff. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is understood to have paid its corporate broking teams bonuses to stay, while UBS, Europe's biggest casualty of the credit crunch, is said to have also paid up to stop rivals nabbing its best people.

The idea that bonuses could disappear, as the authorities wish, is seen as a joke in the City. Regulators insist that pay reform is on the way, and last week the Financial Services Authority's three-month consultation over its pay recommendations closed. However, whatever the FSA says, the premium on star names will remain. In an industry reliant upon contacts and relationships, they are the banks' lifeblood. The banks will always find a way to attract and reward them. Bonuses have not only not been away, they are not going anywhere.

via thisislondon.co.uk

Kaaaki

The new currencies reflect a changing landscape for scarcity, what any currency is based on.

And Jordan, The Wall Street Journal

In a time where information is abundant, there needs to be a new definition of what's becoming scarce: attention, trust, reputation.

Austin Hill, Venture capitalist

The centralized currency was developed by monarchs in the 12th and 13th century to prevent peer-to-peer transactions.

Douglas Rushkoff, Author
via kaaaki.com

 

The Future of Money

Friendship

Chinese symbol for friendship

  • The global money system no longer works in our best interests; we need a serious overhaul of money - and of our attitude towards it.  Based on the four mega-trends of monetary instability, the ageing global population, the information revolution, and climate change, Bernard Lietaer looks at different scenarios of what the world might be like in 2020.
    1. The Corporate Millennium: governments are disbanded, central banks become irrelevant, and the world is run with Big Brother control by huge corporations with their own currencies.
    2. Caring Communities: after a monetary crash, people retreat into small, self-sustaining communities, like tribes.
    3. Hell on Earth: in which the breakdown of life as we know it is followed by a highly individualistic free-for-all, resulting in an ever more obscene gulf between rich and poor.
    4. Sustainable Abundance: envisages a world where we take better care of the environment, re-engage the poor and the unemployed in mainstream society and give back time and fufilment to the over-worked, while providing the elderly with a high level of personal care.
     A society of Sustainable Abundance is achievable - but only if we are willing to re-think our money system and use money innovations that have already proven effective somewhere in the world today.

    http://www.lietaer.com/books/futureofmoney.html

  • If the thought of eliminating money still troubles you, consider this: If a group of people with gold, diamonds and money were stranded on an island that had no resources such as food, clean air and water, their wealth would be irrelevant to their survival. It is only when resources are scarce that money can be used to control their distribution. One could not, for example, sell the air we breathe or water abundantly flowing down from a mountain stream. Although air and water are valuable, in abundance they cannot be sold.
    Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such.

    http://www.thevenusproject.com/anewResource.php

  • Advantages of open money

    • Decentralized: no need for a centralized issuer like a bank, which means no threats from a centralized power.
    • Free: no interest is practiced because there is no issuer that makes a business of it. The only cost is the one of the infrastructure, which is a flat marginal cost, not an exponential one like in the interest.
    • Peer-to-peer: the total quantity of money in the community is determined in realtime by peer-to-peer exchange. There is no centralized authority that determines how much, where and when the quantity of money should be allocated. These can be seen as distributed fractal feedback loops to regulate the system and make it resilient.
    • Controlled by the people: the rules of circulation, credit limits, taxes, decision making processes, etc, are controlled by the community itself. These settings can be configured via software.
    • Sufficient: because based on mutual credit?, i.e. there's never a lack of money since it is created upon the needs/wants streaming.
    • Holoptical: transparent between users, and users have access to the meta level of the system to understand and regulate its whole equilibrium.
    • Adapted to all needs and all communities: whether communities are based on a local territory or a virtual one, each community exists because it has a circulating offer/demand within it. It can be time exchange, objects, services, knowledge... in a competitive or collaborative economy. Mainstream currencies only serve competitive markets, open money serves whatever market since it is sufficient and can be applied in any context.
    • Connected to any "real" or "virtual" value: any community currency can be based on a "real" value (time, gold, kilowatt, kilo of potatoes, oil, distance...) or a "virtual" value (i.e. no relation to anything in the real world, it is just a unit of exchange used by the community)

    http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki-index.php?page=Open+Money