Getting paid in space

Darren,

Thanks for clarifying your currency and explaining the backing system for it. I greatly appreciate the time you spent creating this text. I do hope others out there have read this, as it does make plenty of cents(okay, i couldn't help but make a joke, needing something to comment off of the two joules worth by Darren). As a matter of fact, Darren summarized what took a publicly ran school 6 months to explain, into a 2 page email.

But I must ask a couple more questions about this backing method. So the backing method, joules, follows the same idea of keeping power regulated to keep the currency at an average rate? By this I mean, say we have $10 bank notes to a single joule of electricity(which is wildly off, the joule to dollar rate would probably be much different) and for every joule of electricity used, the government/managing agency could print another $10 bank notes. And so from this, if public government doesn't keep up with building power plants as the needs arise, the value of the currency will go up. But like wise, if they build to much, the currency will go down? Or does it not, mainly because it only is affected by how much electricity is used? On a final note, this also makes it so private companies cannot own power stations correct? That's how I see it. Or can they, and just sell the power to the government for an appropriate amount of money per joule?

On a final note, I haven't paid much attention to all the discussions lately. Is this group just discussing ideas for future creation of space stations, or is there some type of team gathering information and constructing business plans, gathering funders and luring in supporters? We are still 15-20 years off from having a privately owned space station, and if you guys aren't working closer to the goal, who will?

Final clarification, and then I'm good,

Ryan

Darren wrote:
Ryan,

For my part I would be using it as the backing for the currency. If you go
back in time far enough (only a few hundred years) there was just one type
of money, ( have a look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money ) that was
the coin, it had the value of the metal it was made from. The problem with
this is that you are limited to the number of coins you can make, to make
more coin you need more metal or you can debase the metal, that is mix it
with a less valuable metal. The other big problem is that people begin to
think that the metal itself has value, this is not the case, it is the
metals rarity that has value (water is valuable in a desert but not in a
river), this leads to a push to find more of the metal but that just
decreases the metals real value.
So now we come to the other kinds of money fiat and credit, fiat money is
what you use today, a bit of paper that has value because the bank or
government says it has value and credit money which is just a bank or
issuing institution promising to make good on an IOU that somebody makes.
Today money has value because we all agree it has value. This leads to the
possibility of the banks/markets/governments manipulating the value of the
currency to their benefit and is why paranoids who have a mistrust of
governments (and to be fair others who just like the idea and some who yearn
for the good old days and a few who are convinced they have solid logical
reasons) want to go back to a gold standard, its much harder to manipulate
gold backed currency but not impossible.

So what we have here is basically two sides that have mutually exclusive
ideas of what should be money (but really they are closer than some people
like to think), currency that is linked to a real object, be it giant stone
coins, polished sea shells or bits of shiny metal and currency that is
linked to an agreement by society (and laws to enforce the agreement) and
the opinion of the markets as to the relative strength of one economy
compared to another and the promise by people to honour debts.

Now which one is better? Hard to say, each has good points and bad points, a
gold standard, known as a hard currency (and when I say gold I mean any real
item ­ gold, silver, oil, sea shells, measures of grain, anything you can
touch) has the problem of your money being limited to your supply of the
real item and this can constrain your economy and with a sudden influx of
the item from a new source, destroy your economy, people forget that the
items value is dependant on how little there is of it, this leads to the
schizophrenic situation where you want more gold but the more NEW gold you
have the less it is worth per unit. And in a fiat currency or soft currency,
you have the problem of possible manipulation of the value of the currency
by powerful forces in the economy, although in truth this is not as easy as
many people think. However it is true that hard currencies are generally
more stable than soft currencies and oddly, this stability is one of its
flaws, it can not grow very fast.

This brings us to my suggestion (time for a bit of confession, its not just
my idea, I have seen things like it in a number of places but I did come up
with it by myself and have thought about it a great deal), my problem with
the gold standard is that you are limited by the amount of gold you have, if
you want to back your currency with a thing, what you need is something you
can make and can make as many as you need, when you need it. It should be
impossible to counterfeit, it should have real value, it should be
transferable and it should be numerable, that is you should be able to count
it and each should be the same as the one before it and the one after it.
Energy fits this very well almost perfectly.

You would have a currency that is like a fiat currency, that is bills and
coins of very small cost that represent a large value, credit can be issued
as a promise to supply energy in the future and it has the stability of a
gold standard currency because you are limited in the amount of money you
can issue because you only have a certain amount of energy but unlike gold,
as your economy grows you are going to need more energy (this is almost a
direct link, if you chart economic growth against power consumption, you
will get an almost exact match, a nations wealth can be linked directly to
its energy consumption) so you build more power stations and you link your
currency to power generation. There is however one fly in the ointment, it
is possible for some new technology allowing you to do more with less power,
so you would need a way to change the link so that one unit of currency
could represent a variable amount of energy but this would have to be watch
very closely as it could be abused so you would have make it hard to change
the link.

So to answer your question in a simple way, your money would be backed by
the energy, you would not go around with a little battery and discharge it
into a stores battery in order to buy a bottle of milk.

So again just my two joules worth.

Darren Brown

On 19/8/06 5:08 AM, "Ryan Lokey" wrote:

>
> I also like the idea of using a non-counterfietable currency, and the fact
> that it can be stored, but I do need an explanation. How do you used Joules of
> electricty to purchase object and take care of your needs? Do you trade the
> joules like you do currency? Or were you thinking of just using it to back up
> the currency. If you could just explain this method a little more, I'd
> appreciate it.
>
> Ryan
>
> I think the idea of using the Joule (or Megajoule) as
> the unit of currency is an excellent idea. It is
> impossible to counterfeit, is fungible, can be stored
> without losing its value, and has intrinsic value.
>
> Ed
>
> --- Darren > wrote:
>
>> > So ideally you
>> > should use something that
>> > is rare, can be measured, is hard/impossible to
>> > counterfeit and, this is the
>> > biggy, can be increased as your economy grows. I
>> > suggest you use power, that
>> > is energy. The wealth of a nation is linked to power
>> > consumption and as your
>> > economy grows so does your need for power. The
>> > problem (for some) is that
>> > this is not a real object, you cant hold it in your
>> > hand, so really you
>> > have the kind of economy that we have today except
>> > it isnt exactly the
>> > same, rather than the dollar having the value that
>> > the markets, banks and
>> > governments says it has, they are restrained to a
>> > value tied to power usage,
>> > the wealthier the nation the more power they use,
>> > the market, banks and
>> > governments would still be able to change the value
>> > but they would be
>> > limited in the degree they could. A compromise
>> > between a floating value and
>> > fixed value.
>> >
>> > Okay, what do you think?
>> >
>> > Darren Brown

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