listen to uncommon core, every episode starting with the first, and you'll have a nice view from the inside. signal-to-noise ratio in crypto is atrocious, high signal sources are alpha
metallic standards often had debasement (that's why it's called debasement). but also no one is arguing that inflation is a function of ONLY money printing, but no one can argue that money printing is not one of the inputs that determines inflation
nah fam that won't likely be the final topology of the network. you can have oracles all the way down and a slashing risk for those that deviate significantly from the consensus prices and CPI numbers. so you're trusting the economic design of the system to appropriately incentivize the participants to give honest data
this is a reference to a famous Milton Friedman quote "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" — of course this is a tautology, but he didn't mean the trivial version when he said it, but rather he was making an empirical claim.
in this piece it looks like the author is making the tautological version of the claim, by following up and describing it as "a function of money printing" — which is obviously true it is a function of money printing and several other things
Including the computation and data on-chain enables other parties to use it trustlessly and verifiably. If you, for example, wanted to make an algorithmic central bank that reacted to inflation numbers you would need on-chain CPI in order to do that. Similarly you may want to index your interest rate to the CPI in some way (like LIBOR). It becomes a lot more useful when on-chain than in a central database
Don't want to duck your question but: the reason this is hard to get a handle on is that it's really complicated.
It's not that the premises and protocols themselves are complicated — sure, they're technically sophisticated, but they can be explained simply. The problem lies in that it is very hard to predict the economic consequences and security guarantees of the various consensus mechanisms. Frankly, if Bitcoin hadn't been working flawlessly for the past 12 years very few people would guess that it would work.
so nice to see the hackernews crowd finally figuring it out!
i totally agree with you. i feel that if you keep digging, you'll find yourself convinced over time that BTC's "technical challenges" are not the flaws that they originally appear, and that in the long run crypto does make sense as a currency itself, in addition to a financial infrastructure.
There is no alternative for the monetization of an asset. Gold was the same. Some people believed in it, many didn't, and as it monetized over time those that believed in it early benefited most.
The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.