7 ms·

I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).

• bowsamic 4y ago
  Have you read Marx?
  • alangibson 4y ago
    I was about to write a comment about energetic Marxism and the Energy Theory of Value
  • contravariant 4y ago
    Kind of interesting to note that 'work' (as in physical energy) and 'labour' use the same word in German.
    • whatch 4y ago
      As in Russian (and I guess in Ukrainian).
      • drran 4y ago
        In Ukrainian: work - робота, labour - праця.
    • samber 4y ago
      in french too
    • alangibson 4y ago
      Yea, but power is Kraft.
      • _Microft 4y ago
        German "Kraft"[0] as physical term means "force" in English, while "power" translates as "Leistung"[1]. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik)
        • selimthegrim 4y ago
          He is probably thinking in sense of “Atomkraft”
        • alangibson 4y ago
          Honestly they get mixed up just like in English. Kraftwerk for power plant, Kraftstoff for fuel. But then you have elektrische Leistung for electrical power.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • kwhitefoot 4y ago
      And in English.
    • torotonnato 4y ago
      In Italian too (lavoro)
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Labor is just labora- latin for work.
    • inciampati 4y ago
      And English. clarification: those words are 100% exact synonyms. (Native speaker, of American at least.)
• thriftwy 4y ago
  In the Alpha Centauri game setting, energy is literally money ("energy credits").
  • affgrff2 4y ago
    And that's what PoW crypto currencies are: sacrificed energy.
    • mandmandam 4y ago
      The word sacrifice suggests a religious connotation that seems worth exploring... Indeed, sooo much energy is utterly wasted; but there's no getting through to the followers. You can scream and roar, wheedle and persuade, but they won't give up the idea that their sacrifices are necessary for the cosmic wheel to keep turning. BTC (and other PoW) maxis are the priest class; bag holders are the wealthy funders getting the temples built. Missionaries get rewarded for bringing new acolytes into the fold. Will the brutal religion survive? Or will it fall to a New Testament upstart?
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730923
• 41b696ef1113 4y ago
  The book Windup Girl [0] is a SciFi novel set in a universe where climate change has completely altered the world. Fossil fuels are no longer available, so production is limited by genetically engineered products or human/animal labor to charge in-universe batteries. Calorie cost of items becomes front and center to many activities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl
  • chrisweekly 4y ago
    Really interesting book -- in part because the "calories as currency" isn't even its primary focus, rather merely one part of the backdrop. Recommended, for sure.
  • celestialcheese 4y ago
    Paolo Bacigalupi is fantastic if you're into eco-disaster sci-fi. The Water Knife[1] is also excellent, and with the extreme drought in the western US, feeling more and more prescient. 1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife
• zenon 4y ago
  Joules can be converted to Bitcoin.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Money is an exchange medium through which any transactable commodity, good, service, or asset may be exchanged for another. The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
• beefman 4y ago
  There's excellent theoretical and empirical support for this idea How persistent is civilization growth? (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635 Can we predict long-run economic growth? (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102 https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102 Modes of growth in dynamic systems (2012) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039 Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (2013) https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554 https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554 Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis (2014) https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171 https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171 Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth (2015) https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015 https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015 Global wealth n years after 1801 (2015) https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185 https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185 See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics https://www.amazon.com/dp/1441993975 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1441993975
• brnt 4y ago
  Always thought that currency should equal J/K, the unit of entropy. It's the one thing we 'use up'.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    There's a long history of this. I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914). (That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>) The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics. I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing_the_concept_of_money_as_backed_by_energy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...> My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves. Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• quasarj 4y ago
  That would be interesting - but then how to rectify the fact that so many currencies have different values?
• hydrogen7800 4y ago
  And, perhaps equivalent, I've long suspected that all wealth ultimately comes from the earth.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  Yes, but more like power than energy. The main problem is that energy can't really be stored, so energy cannot be saved like money can (sort of). So it is really power that money buys, not energy, and only supposing power is available. This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Stores of energy are frequently called fuels. There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
    • cryptonector 4y ago
      You don't get energy and materials back out of building things for which there is no demand. There is no way to store natural gas to meet one year's demand. There is no way to store electric power to meet one year's demand. Not even one month's. There is no way to store wind or solar power (see above). Nuclear fuels, of course, can be stockpiled, but you can't demand more power than the nuclear plants that exist can produce, so having 100 years' worth of enriched uranium alone wouldn't help you produce extra power in any particularly hot summer / cold winter. Fuel is not the form in which we want energy when we turn an electric light on! > Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities. That's not possible. You've paid too much attention to Holdren. You cannot make people alternate sleep/wake cycles so that we can have steady base load and no peak load. Or whatever else you have in mind for "varying demand" to match supply, unless that's rolling power outages. Electric energy cannot be saved in any significant amount, full stop. Excess supply can be sent to ground, but excess demand cannot be met except with power generation using fuels that can be throttled very quickly (and that's essentially only natural gas). That means that electric power supply has to match demand or we must constantly run base power generation at peak demand rates and send excess to ground -- a tremendous waste! There's no way around this. Even if we did have batteries that were a) small, b) cheap, c) had enormous capacity, those would essentially be -when charged- coulombic bombs that have to be kept from exploding. Indeed, there are physical limits to electric energy store density where you can trivially get that energy back as power. For example, we've all seen that smartphone batteries are small explosives (recall the Samsung Galaxy fiasco), so now scale that way up and imagine what that would mean.