The reason for volatility is that any such concept at scale is subject to just the messiest lump of evolving opinions on everything. It will deflate, inflate, deflate wildly because it’s utterly subject to the whims of the people without any mechanism to counter a lack of mass consensus on what ‘value’ is.
We started noticing as things scaled up, there needed to be some regulatory management to counter the whimsical populace. Hard to fight mass inflation or deflation when you can’t do anything to manage the “money supply” to offset panic.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah, and we have that…
It’s called fiat currency 🙄
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah, because the last time humans tried decentralized money it also caused a ton of problems.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency isn’t inventing anything new, it’s just doing the same old localized bank notes system again, but with computers™
Even if crypto had any actual physical value, and solved the stability problems, lack of inflation, etc, it would still end up having control issues, because those already wealthy in a lot of it could manipulate the value easily by simply exchanging it or dumping it.
So basically you’d just end up with the problems of current currencies + all the problems crypto has, which were the same problems localized notes had 200 or so years as well.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yes, I’ve remembered my old idea of something like an automated digital barter connected to storage space and computation provided on demand for tokens (every provider an issuer), or something else confirmed by escrow or whatever, after learning that in China 200 years ago people used non-uniform money, that is, all kinds of coins, some literally ancient still in circulation, and somehow that worked.
That wouldn’t be as convenient as uniform money as a universal equivalent, but wouldn’t have that particular kind of problem, which value manipulation via such globally meaningful action. Simply because there’d be no single variable to manipulate.