Rethinking a Long-Held Position
Apr. 24th, 2012 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feste_sylvainI still believe that we have to get "the value of money" out of the hands of bureaucrats, to the extent that we can. The gold-standard position to take in lieu of "fiat currency" is, well, the gold standard. This is not because gold has some alchemical magic, or because Gawd told us to use it, but simply because it is difficult to counterfeit (or easy to tell when counterfeited), and the world's known reserves are really well known: we know where they are, and roughly how much gold they contain. There haven't been any gold rushes lately, and the gold mines are fairly well staked. This makes gold, as a commodity, very difficult to inflate.
I would quasi-flippantly say, "So until we find an asteroid made of gold to haul down to Earth, it's about the most stable commodity we could use."
James Cameron and Google are emphasizing my quasi-, and shorting out my flippancy:
Asteroid mining is imminent. Sure, they're mostly talking about using the minerals which are already up there for construction and stuff outside our gravity well, but you know if they find a quarter-ton of gold or platinum, most of that will work its way down to us.
Which is great for electronics, catalysts, and, oh, jewelry I suppose, but it means that the previously-stable commodity will inflate.
Ultimately, we'll probably use energy itself as our commodity to back currency, but that's well past the life-times of anyone able to read this. Maybe Frank Ryan's old idea of using Fancy-grade maple syrup isn't as wacky as it originally sounded.
Oh, yeah, asteroid mining will also make things like space-ports, space-based solar power, zero-gravity-built pharmaceuticals, extremely-fine-grained (XFG) powder chemistry, and all sorts of other wonderfulness feasible. So, yay! And, unlike NASA, it will get people interested in space again.
I would quasi-flippantly say, "So until we find an asteroid made of gold to haul down to Earth, it's about the most stable commodity we could use."
James Cameron and Google are emphasizing my quasi-, and shorting out my flippancy:
Asteroid mining is imminent. Sure, they're mostly talking about using the minerals which are already up there for construction and stuff outside our gravity well, but you know if they find a quarter-ton of gold or platinum, most of that will work its way down to us.
Which is great for electronics, catalysts, and, oh, jewelry I suppose, but it means that the previously-stable commodity will inflate.
Ultimately, we'll probably use energy itself as our commodity to back currency, but that's well past the life-times of anyone able to read this. Maybe Frank Ryan's old idea of using Fancy-grade maple syrup isn't as wacky as it originally sounded.
Oh, yeah, asteroid mining will also make things like space-ports, space-based solar power, zero-gravity-built pharmaceuticals, extremely-fine-grained (XFG) powder chemistry, and all sorts of other wonderfulness feasible. So, yay! And, unlike NASA, it will get people interested in space again.
