LENR technology and cryptocurrency

I think blockchain, company/community collectives and cryptocurrency tech can have an interesting symbiosis with decentralised power delivery.

Quote from Curbina

In the long run all forms of exchange should tend to dissapear in a post scarcity technological society (as proposed in the Star Trek kind of society where accumulation of material welfare ceases to be the driving force of humanity). In the short and mid term, all bets are off.

Personally i'm not sure if that is utopia considering human nature. I think we will always want to possess things or benefit from the ideas and work we produce, though there are probably many things we need money for right now that will not be a problem I guess in a near future minimal scarcity situation. I don't believe in post scarcity as long as we live in a material world with finite resource, and i'm fine with that. Considering the fact the finite can still mean millions of years of resources for steady development in this solar system. Heaven is post scarcity.

Quote from Max Nozin

Blockchain payment systems is in extreme contradiction with exiting money laundering and anti terror policies. For instance US gov. needs to force reporting of all crypto payments or lift existing requirements as they don't make any sense. In my view, before this issue is resolved, it is too early to talk about big crypto feature.

If the governments attempt to monitor everything in a top down centralised manner with a loss of net neutrality and restricted free commerce it will spoil things for all of us not just criminals.

Quote from LeBob

Personally i'm not sure if that is utopia considering human nature. I think we will always want to possess things or benefit from the ideas and work we produce, though there are probably many things we need money for right now that will not be a problem I guess in a near future minimal scarcity situation.

Some things are already free, or so cheap they might as well be free. You can have all the clean drinking water you want for practically no money. You can have gigabytes of on-line disk space free from Google. You can read all the books you want from the library, and many thousands of books out of copyright online. I don't think anyone wants to "possess" these things. People don't hoard water. They are not jealous or upset that other people can have all the water they want, or read all the books they want. * Back when books cost a lot of money, wealthy people had large libraries in their mansions. I don't think anyone would build a library nowadays. I myself have hundreds of books. I am not jealous of people who have only electronic libraries. Frankly, I wish I could magically transform my printed books into e-books, ** because they take up space and they are difficult to find and search through.

There is no competition or possessiveness attached to material goods that are available in unlimited amounts. The people who invented hard disks and Google, giving us zero cost storage, do not want to possess the things their work produced. Although they do want to profit from them in other ways. Google, by selling advertisements.

My point is that people are only possessive about things that are inherently limited in number, or unique, such as impressionist paintings; or things that cost a lot to make, such as luxury automobiles. If, in the future, we perfect reproduction technology so that we can make a million copies of an impressionist painting that are exact copies down to the molecular level, no one will be possessive about them. It would be like being possessive over the photo image of a painting on the internet.

Arthur Clarke discussed this in his book "Profiles of the Future."

* Authors are upset with libraries that lend out their books without paying royalties, but that's a special case. That's their livelihood. It isn't the books they are possessive about. They want people to read them.

** I have scanned 30 or 40 technical books and many old magazines with https://1dollarscan.com/ and with an EPSON ES-400 double sided scanner. Attached is an example of a 1943 magazine scanned with the EPSON. Science Digest 1943 extract.pdf Page 21 has interesting comments. Apparently, the Manhattan Project was not as secret as Uncle Sam hoped it was.

Ohh well, i see the point, but I think there are some things where i would want the authentic child of someone's imagination. An artifact that has emotional/historical value and purpose.

On a real note crafting won't disappear, hopefully.

Interesting to see this being discussed here I don't think that LENR would influence crypto a lot but ultimately both fields of technology will most probably lead to a much greater degree of decentralization and personal freedom. If you do not rely on "the grid" anymore to receive energy and heat, then a different form of lifestyle suddenly becomes feasible and people might also start to experiment with different forms of society (like the described non-scarcity scenario where people just "share" their possessions). But I think it will take a while for this to happen as the desire to "own" something is most probably embedded deep in our social structures.

I don't think that the desire to possess things is inherently "human" as in the early days of being hunter-gatherers we also didn't have the concept of "property", but it will take time for society to adopt.

Quote from barty

I'm sure other techniques like proof-of-stake of directed acyclic graph ledgers (like IOTA) will succeed in the long run.

I totally agree. The vision of IOTA is essentially the described "zero-marginal cost society" where stuff is shared and most things are free. I can recommend the book by Jeremy Rifkin which covers exactly this (also in the context of the next "revolution" - the Internet Of Things).

Btw. I am happy to see IOTA being mentioned here as I am one of the IOTA core developers