Private currency to generate funds for effective altruism

I don't agree that non-profits are more trusted, especially in financial matters, and especially compared to firms such as Goldman Sachs. To the extent there is profit to be made with a private currency, a non-profit would have almost no chance when competing with a Goldman Sachs or PayPal.

The advantage of non-profits is that people have a warm and fuzzing feeling about them, but this probably wouldn't much help a non-profit when marketing a private currency.

There is a long history of banks offering private currencies. You could check to see if non-profits were ever in this business.

The idea behind GPL is free software. The idea that good software should be available for everyone. The blessing of the digital age that you could copy things without a price. That everyone shoud benefit from it. I won't go further into what free means here. But just giving software away doesn't achieve this. Other people/comps will just use it and protect it with whatever means they have. The old principle of the competition of the strongest (marketeer).

To counter the existing legal means of exploiting 'unprotected' software the GPL does two things that are entwined: It uses an existing valid legal construct - the licensing model - to ensure that the software may not be exploited and stays free. And the second point - GPLs viral nature - causes it to grow and spread.

Actually there are more embedding means applied by the FSF. Companies may sign over software to the FSF (or other cheritable trust) for a nominal price that is the donation and the company can therefore tax-deduct it. A win-win situation for both but an additional means to add free software to the pool making it grow more.

One question I have seldom seen answered by social utopia models is how to get to the utopia from here and now. And the solution I see for this is a growing embedding of the utopia in the current society.

I have seldom seen this applied (except as above) but I immediately recognized it in your post.

Assuming your utopia - or rather the fragment of utopia related to a better currency - is an efficient digital currency feeding back efficient common wellfare. Then you have essentially shown how to embed this in a growing way:

• Use a legal construct - a cheritable trust - to ensure a legally bound entity is handing out the 'currency'

• Use another legal construct - an alternate currency - to ensure legal convertability.

• Use social expectations and customs - donation and the trustee community - to propagate the construct.

You didn't name precise rules for the statutes of the trust, but I'm sure these could be drafted by a dedicated lawyer easily.

I think there is much to be learned from this with respect to hacking society - esp. with advanced technology.

We see tentative tries with direct democracy and free-nets to bring in the boon of technology for all. But many fail in doing it in an embedding way thus causing friction and counterforce instead of synergy.

EDIT. Fixed typos,

People did end up buying dogecoin, after all. Was dogecoin what started you thinking about it?

And as far as trust goes, one could have a network imposed limit on the coin creation rate, the coin creation requiring a secret key which can be revoked and replaced when stolen. The absolute worst case where all the money get misused is still not as bad as burning electricity. I say we should start a website about the idea and approach, say, GiveWell.

Hehe. Well you could call such an actor the government - I don't want to quibble on words since I don't like verbal disputes - but there would certainly be many things that differentiated it from a normal government.

Note that getting currency monopoly would give you two sorts of seignorage. Firstly, you would get seignorage on the way there. People would buy your currency using other currencies, which would give you enormous incomes. At the same time, conventional currencies would lose value, which would mean holders of these currencies would lose immensely. Secondly, once you have monopoly power, printing new money in order to get some small amount of inflation a year (which is seen as desirable according to conventional economic theory) will give you 3,5 % of GDP in seignorage a year according to Kumhof (if I remember correctly).

So certainly this would give you huge incomes, and power. Still, you would not have monopoly on power which is the traditional definition of government, etc.

ultimately it consumes a stock of resources equal to the net worth of your entire formal economy to no purpose whatsoever.

No, actually, bitcoins created early in the process were created cheaply since their value wasn't as high back then.

Scenario A: There start out being 100 X-coins. A new X-coin is created. This coin is purchased, and the price distributed equally among the holders of the previous X-coins.

Scenario B: There start out being 100 X-coins. Each X-coin is declared to be equal to 1.01 X'-coin. Someone then bids for the right to buy all those .01 X'-coins.

What's the difference between these two scenarios?

In either case, whoever starts out owning 1 X-coin owns 1% of the total currency. Not just 1% of the present currency, but 1% of the entire net present of the expected value of the currency. An X-coin issue doesn't increase the market capitalization of the coins, it just acts like a partial split.

This is, if I understand correctly, wasteful to some extent.

Not completely, it has the side effect of making it even harder to double spend bitcoins.

The value created by the currency is the gains from the trades the currency makes possible.