Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> Here PetroDollar = US dollar and FED=US Federal Government?


FED = Federal Reserve, the (private) central bank that issues the US Dollar for about a century now. interesting tidbit: originally 'a US Dollar' meant a specific amount of silver.

and the 'petrodollar' is a unique keyword that you can chose to research. it's way offtopic here, but very briefly: if you want to issue more fiat money, *and* you also want to avoid it going worthless in short term, then you need to arrange for a proportional demand for your new tokens.

one important pillar of that demand can come from making sure that most of the energy trade is settled in USD, and as a consequence of that, most of the large economic players will want to hold USD as reserves to cover their expected energy consumption. this can be an enormous driver of demand for USD (for a while). it's also worth mentioning here that blocking your account at the FED means getting cut off from most of the energy suppliers/consumers who cannot dare to risk a visit from the US military.

this model nicely explains most of the US wars in the last few decades, and many, otherwise hard to explain political phenomena (e.g. US - Saudi Arabia relations).

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the monetary system is what facilitates cooperation among strangers, i.e. among a group of humans larger than the Dunbar's number (about 150 people). sound money is a kind of decentralized, anonymous reputation system (that can only track positive reputation, and the tokens serve as the proof). its primary role is to lock out non-cooperating agents from the fruits of cooperation.

cooperation -> specialization -> efficient agents -> wealthy society.

IOW, the monetary system fundamentally influences what our everyday existence looks like. and the more anomalies there are in the rules governing the acquisition of the tokens (e.g. someone is allowed to print it while others must work for it), the more twisted society will become.

i have plenty more to say, but i doubt there's general interest in having this discussion on guix-devel. i hope though, that i managed to incite some curiosity, because this topic has much more depth than you seem to be aware of, and blockchains/Bitcoin are only one piece of this puzzle.

essentially, it's a new battlefront between centralized command and decentralized consensus; between coercive hierarchies and voluntary networks.

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• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
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“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
	— Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968, assassinated)