I was trying to think about how to make altruism the optimal choice for non altruists and realized that it has already been done. Money…
Capitalism has its flaws but It is extremely successful because it does exactly that. When a person does something which helps another person using the capitalist system, they get money, and can then spend that money to benefit themselves. The net effect being huge benefit to everyone through efficiency in scale.
But capitalism seems to cause a lot of bad things as well. If it was successfully making altruism the selfish choice, then it wouldn’t do this. So what is missing?
There’s a few things but the main two are:
Money doesn’t detriment those who detriment others.
Money is exchanged based on beliefs of benefit, not ‘actual benefit’ and so can be manipulated.
So. With this in mind, what if we made a better version of currency?
I’ll leave that question as a ongoing discussion point. But here is my promised counterintuitive version of currency. It will likely seem dumb at first glance, but I am fairly sure it would inherently solve a good number of problems and can be improved upon.
Probably a bit to much lead up. It’s just normal currency with public accounts and transaction records. But where each coin decays into more of itself and anti-coin. The anti coin can be “given” to someone to take away their money, or burnt to do nothing. The decay could be tweaked to match desired inflation. Anti-money would have a maximum lifespan to prevent buildup.
I want to influence your thoughts as little as possible so as to not add my biases to your judgment, but I have thought about this a good bit and am still suggesting it, so I hope that if you determine it is a bad idea, you have thought about it more than me.
A counter-intuitive way to make currency better.
I was trying to think about how to make altruism the optimal choice for non altruists and realized that it has already been done. Money…
Capitalism has its flaws but It is extremely successful because it does exactly that. When a person does something which helps another person using the capitalist system, they get money, and can then spend that money to benefit themselves. The net effect being huge benefit to everyone through efficiency in scale.
But capitalism seems to cause a lot of bad things as well. If it was successfully making altruism the selfish choice, then it wouldn’t do this. So what is missing?
There’s a few things but the main two are:
Money doesn’t detriment those who detriment others.
Money is exchanged based on beliefs of benefit, not ‘actual benefit’ and so can be manipulated.
So. With this in mind, what if we made a better version of currency?
I’ll leave that question as a ongoing discussion point. But here is my promised counterintuitive version of currency. It will likely seem dumb at first glance, but I am fairly sure it would inherently solve a good number of problems and can be improved upon.
Probably a bit to much lead up. It’s just normal currency with public accounts and transaction records. But where each coin decays into more of itself and anti-coin. The anti coin can be “given” to someone to take away their money, or burnt to do nothing. The decay could be tweaked to match desired inflation. Anti-money would have a maximum lifespan to prevent buildup.
I want to influence your thoughts as little as possible so as to not add my biases to your judgment, but I have thought about this a good bit and am still suggesting it, so I hope that if you determine it is a bad idea, you have thought about it more than me.
But yeah. Thoughts? Improvements? EA crypto?