A note on integer problems.

It's surprising and intriguing that it is more difficult to solve many problems restricted to integers than it is to solve problems when the number are not so restricted. It's surprising because the possible solution set is smaller if it's restricted to integers. This indicates the math I'm aware of (if not math in general) is not fully employing the concept of "solving problems backwards". As a side note, from my reading of how they were able to derive most of the shortest possible solutions to the Rubik's cube (an "integer" problem where you have a short list of possible moves at each step), it seems they largely depended on a "working backwards" methodology.  Actually I'm not sure any optimization problem can do without "working backwards". It's how you generally solve problems in science, first stating the question to be answered which is really describing the end result you seek.  In another sense it's not surprising not being restricted to integers is easier because if you have more numbers to choose from, then maybe there is more flexibility in the outcome. I mean there are more potential solutions.  Also, most interesting problems are an attempt to optimize something and having a continuous set of possible answers might imply a continuous path from beginning to end that can be optimized over shorter paths and thereby the solution can be "smelled" out more effectively.  Integer solutions imply hit or miss steps (if-then) all the way. All the important questions in life require a distinct choice. Back in 1998 or 2000 should you have bought and held Amazon or Yahoo?  There have been some serious and respected thinkers (like Richard Feynman) who have seriously considered the possibility that nature at its deepest level is digital. As a side note, sometimes we have to extend the potential solutions to the complex plane to find solutions.

In the above I have in mind situations where we have all the information.  Both the data for the input variables and the logical relationships that lead to known output variables.   In competitive economizing agents, if an agent wants to maximize the amount of money in his bank account, his choices depend on the effect of other agents (buyers, sellers, and competitors) who are acting in unknown ways on on unknown data.

How the Moon may have been crucial for life on Earth

Summary: a container of objects can be shaken to result in tighter packing which means lower entropy. The moon has been doing the same to the Earth's water, mantle, and air in a way that is very different (if not opposite) to the Sun's heating. When life began, it provided more than 10% of the energy we are currently receiving from the Sun, maybe up to 50%. A close competitor to the title of "earliest life form known" is stromatolites, still living today in tide waters. Issac Asimov, at least, suggested life could not have made it out of the water without the moon. Viewed another way, the Earth-moon system may be in a low-entropy arrangement, like a gas chamber with two gases separated by a partition with a hole in it and the gases combining to form "copies" of durable bonds as one gas leaks into the other.

An arguing point against my thesis is that an alien machine might be capable of acquiring energy from the Sun and using it to shift through matter on Earth to create copies of itself. So my argument might be limited to "helping life to begin, extend its presence, or dominate more rapidly".

Life and our economic system have lower entropy per mass (aka specific or molar entropy) compared to the raw materials, but system-wide the entropy of Earth may not be lower. For example, when we remove oxygen from metal ores, carbon dioxide, and silicon dioxide the resulting mass of the metal, carbon, and silicon atoms that we use has a LOT lower entropy per mass. It appears to be offset by the entropy increase of the oxygen that is released to the atmosphere. Life and economics may or may not result in a lower net entropy on the face of the Earth, but it definitely results in a lower entropy for each atom we use in our systems. It makes sense our CPUs, hard materials, wiring, and solar panels should have a lower specific entropy: by being in more of a "known state" they can be commanded and controlled better. CPUs & Solar Cells (silicon based) and metal wiring need extremely low specific entropy due to needing to control the placement and/or movement of electrons. Brains are arguably 10 million times less efficient, primarily due to having to move ions that weigh 50,000 times more than electrons, with a lot less precision. As interesting as brains are, they are not as great a reduction in entropy compared to the raw materials. I have not calculated that cement is lower specific entropy compared to the raw materials, but I believe it is.

In regards to the Moon, Earth, entropy, and life: if you randomly drop balls or anything else with a definite shape into a container, they will not be packed as dense as possible, but if you shake the container (while it is in a gravitational field), they will pack more densely. Anything that is more densely packed will have a correspondingly lower entropy. Being in a smaller space means there’s fewer possible states. A harder material also has fewer possible states its atoms might be in for a given temperature because they can't vibrate as far away out of their medium position. The log of the number of states is proportional to entropy so fewer states is lower entropy.

Solid objects in the container are like the mass on Earth, unable to escape the container created by the mantle and gravity. The periodic force from an external source (the shaking) is like the Moon affecting the tides and mantle. Both systems are thermodynamically closed but not isolated: no mass comes in or out, external energy comes in, and heat and entropy go out. In both the container and Earth, the cyclical external force causes friction which will raise the temperature, and assuming both are surrounded by space, the temperature will rise until the black body radiation increase equals the energy from the external cyclical force, emitting heat energy and entropy as photons (S=4/3 U/T). Some potential energy source is driving the cyclical external force.  Potential energy from the source that is not converted to heat (and thereby emits radiation and entropy to the universe) can be used by the matter on Earth to create stronger, tighter-packing bonds that thereby lower the entropy per mass of Earth. Since no mass leaves the Earth, this means the entropy of Earth as a total may decrease.

So a periodic force on a system of particles in a closed but not isolated thermodynamic system in a gravitational or other field of force can result in lower entropy in the system. In other words, the moon may be an important original source of the congealing (hardening) of the matter on Earth, which we call life and economics. The incredibly unlikely and uncommon accident of another planetoid striking the Earth late in the formation of both seems to be the original injection of low entropy (The moon circling the Earth prevents an evening-out of the masses?) that resulted in the Earth-moon system being so darn interesting that it has given rise to life.

There is a huge difference in the type of energy received from the Sun verses the moon. They are actually opposites. The Sun causes heat differentials that can cause bulk matter to move. The moon moves bulk matter that can causes heat differentials. Getting back to my jar-shaking analogy, if the bottom solids get hotter then they will rise from being less dense and currents can occur which might help packing. But the moon is raising more-dense materials to the top then letting them fall. For example, it raises cold water "into" the air. The Sun must first turn the water to steam to do the same. It may be that the combination is important: the moon could be provided a macroscopic form of enabling lower entropy while the Sun, working on a microscopic level is working out details. The juxtaposition ("chaos") of the two, combined with the "return to status quo" being enforced by gravity, could be what makes life interesting.

I should add the influence of the moon may enable more of the medium-weight elements and molecules to be at the surface which enabled more interesting combinations. It may have enabled tighter packing at the surface but at the same time that's suggesting an anti-packing. Or maybe the initial impact was also like shaking a container that resulted in more of the heavier elements getting in the core which might have enabled or blocked life.

I am describing my jar as being full of solids seeking a closer arrangement, but I hope is sufficient enough to not be fundamentally different than if the solids had different levels of stickiness in different places, which is what occurs with molecules.

How can a macroscopic effect of the Moon affect or generate biochemistry? But maybe this is the wrong question when looking at evolution and life. People think of genes as spreading, but this an erroneous starting point that leads to looking at chemical reactions for an explanation of life. Genes are just enzymes. Potential energy gradients (forces) are the original source of all movement and "selfishness".  Genes are not potential energy and therefore are not a source of movement.  They are a result, not a cause. Genes do not "cause" their own replication. Potential energy gradients have pulled them into existence.

I'm proposing some of the rotational energy the Earth is losing due to the moon's presence has somehow helped Earth's biosphere (and "economics-sphere") learn how to extract energy from the Sun (and now other forms of nuclear energy) in order to store the energy in the form of metals, silicon, carbon-carbon bonds, and many biological systems and biochemistry. Life is removing some atoms to a further distance (mainly CO2 and O2) and combining the remaining atoms in a way that allows more strength, stability, longevity, and controllability.

I don't want to immediately include "replication" in this list of important characteristics of life without a full explanation because it immediately generates the idea that genes, brains, and corporations are actively doing something on their own. But replication, along with the other important characteristics of life, corresponds with lower entropy. "Copies" are almost a definition lower entropy. I want to keep "replication" at a distance in my considerations because it is so difficult to remember that genes do not desire to replicate. By extension, the idea that animals "want" to replicate should be only a handy, approximate myth that is not at all true in a deep sense. I think it is related to the way people used to think mind and body were distinctly different things. It requires believing that thought (or the programming in genes and corporations) affect other things on their own without acknowledging that the energy that created and drives them ultimately comes from somewhere else. ( To see that thought is ultimately based on energy, see Landauer's limit E=kT ln(2) which is the absolute minimal amount of energy required to stored or change ("compute") a bit of information. )

"Replication" might be a consequence of the lower of entropy, not merely something that happens to correspond to it. Since lower entropy corresponds to everything that underlies life, maybe it is the key. Maybe the Earth-moon system is the largest example of a lower-than-expected entropy system that we have, acting like a gas chamber with two gases that combine on contact, separated by a partition that has a hole in it. The combination releases heat and results in stronger bonds and we would see a "replication" of the "dance" and end products as time goes on. The Sun merely provides energy.

Pseudo-copies are kind of a requirement when there is a lowering entropy. As when we go to tighter packing arrangements in the container analogy, more arrangements are going to be more frequent. As the tightest bonds get stuck, the result is a smaller variety of bonds you might encounter, or rather you will encounter the tightest bonds more frequently than chance alone. So copies being more frequent might be a logical consequence, not a fictitious end goal of "selfish" genes. But the copies in life are enzymatic. That is, they "assist" the moon and Sun, through no force of their own, to "make" , copies, through no force of their own. The "through no force of their own" is hard to remember. But in what way is a spreading, reproducing chain of restaurants and its business and architectural blueprints enzymatic? It seems to be the exact same kind of process and yet it seems a lot less "enzymatic". By reducing the mysterious feel of enzymes, I hope to accentuate the potential importance of the moon.

Notice that all of the things to matter on Earth that life and economics find so useful also happens to be lower entropy.

Here are some things that are not from the moon that are like the effect I'm proposing:

• Photons from the Sun cause temperature differences that can cause motion.

• Lightening strikes have been theorized to have been important in the origins of life. They are the result of a potential energy gradient between a build-up of opposite charges. The original source of the buildup of the energy is the Sun and/or the Earth's rotation.  The moon may not have significantly increased the lightening strikes despite its effect on the atmosphere and rotation. The Earth's rotation, like Mars, may have been similar without the original Earth-moon collision.

• The mantle may have done a lot of churning without the Moon and still resulted in our lower-entropy concentrations of ores and it may have had similar mountains (potential energy gradients) without the Moon.

The moon may increase or affect all of the above.  It also greatly stabilized the Earth's tilt which resulted in much more reliable seasons over much longer time periods. Others have seriously considered the moon's stabilizing of Earth's axis tilt is a rare characteristic feature of planets and was crucial to life developing here.  This may have helped the Sun's effects by more "cyclical" instead of chaotic. Without proof, I'll suggest cyclical forces may create more order than chaotic ones.

Last but not least is the effect the moon has had on tides. Isaac Asimov has written about how crucial the cyclical tides were for life to leave the oceans.  More importantly, potentially (but probably not) the oldest form of life on Earth known is stromatolites forming in tidal regions 3.7 billion years ago, about 0.7 billion years after the Moon was created. Another competitor is micro-organisms living off the potential energy difference from the sudden temperature change between hot vents in the ocean. Although it does not seem the moon was required to create them or keep them stable, it's possible that it was.

It seems the Sun is much more important for life to be sustained and grow. But maybe the presence of the moon initially caused a redistribution of atoms in the oceans and mantle to lower-entropy arrangements that made more interesting combinations possible.  On a grander scale, certain veins and ores are crucial to modern society. How important was the moon in the geology that has caused them to attain these lower-entropy concentrations? 

As I'll describe below, the energy from the moon when life began may have been 20x or more greater than it is today, reaching maybe more than 10% of the energy currently being received by the Sun.

Now I'll detail the amount of energy being given to the environment by the Earth-moon system and compare it to the Sun.  These are the current numbers. When life began, the Earth was spinning faster and the Moon was closer, so the effect was much greater when life began.  Wiki indicates the moon was about 10% closer 1 billion years ago, in keeping with the current rate of increase in the distance it is getting away, but that it may have been 15x closer soon after the impact. Certainly it was 3x closer when life began which means its gravitational effects were 9x greater, and since the Earth was spinning nearly twice as fast, the friction it generated in the water and mantle may have been 20x greater.

The moon is rising in orbit to a slightly higher potential energy each year, 3.78 cm/year due to receiving energy from the Earth's rotational energy. The moon is orbiting slower than the Earth turns, which is dragging on oceans and mantle to create the tides and more geologic events. The Earth slows 0.73 seconds per year which is 1E22 Joule/year loss in rotational energy. The moon's increase in gravitational potential energy is 7.6E18 Joule/year. The large difference between the two is the available "external" cyclical force source (energy) that I am claiming has helped cause mater on Earth to congeal to a more dense, lower-entropy state. The energy being injected into the oceans and mantle is 1,000x higher than the energy being used to raise the Moon to a higher orbit each year. The source of the energy is a loss in the Earth's rotational energy which may have been increased or decreased by the collision that created the moon.

( Previously I have argued this loss of the Earth's rotational energy is an internal energy loss which is known to spontaneously cause snowflakes (lower entropy) as a result of Gibbs free energy math.  A reaction is spontaneous and can result in lower entropy if the internal energy drop in the reactants is greater than the drop in temperature. Negative dG means spontaneous and dG=dU-TdS. But my argument on that fails when considering the Earth because it needs other "molecules" with rotational energy besides itself to form the "snowflake".  )

The 1E22 Joule/year from the Earth's rotational energy is huge. Most of it comes out as heat from friction in the tides and mantle. That creates temperature differences which might be useful as a "heat engine" to life, but it causes other potential energy differences such as waves, tides, and mountains. Going from there to genes is a long step, but the oldest life forms seemed to need these differences. to repeat, most of the energy is wasted heat which raises the Earth's temperature a very small amount above what the Sun is doing, and the energy gets lost to space as black body radiation. But some of it is getting transformed from Earth's rotational energy to potential energy in the placement of mass on the Earth such as mountains. I'm proposing some of it, which was especially important in the beginning of life on Earth, was getting stored as stronger chemical bonds, which lowers entropy per mole for the atoms involved.

Other than great temperature differences like the ocean vents, heating is not what I'm looking for.  There seems to be a certain quality of the moon's "shaking" that is a lot better than simple heating.  The Sun does a LOT of heating.

The Sun is adding 1.5E24 Joules/year with the current albedo of 0.3. This is only 150 times more energy than the current loss of the Earth's rotational energy. As I mentioned before this means when life began the moon may have accounted for 10% of what the Sun is currently doing. The Sun's energy causes a corresponding excess amount of black body radiation and entropy emission and "heat engines". So if my thesis is correct (that the moon was as crucial as the Sun in generating life and that it's based on an entropy or other thermodynamic effect), the type of energy being injected by the cyclical force of the moon is extremely important and that the character of the moon is somehow better than the Sun for life to arise in the beginning. The Sun's heat is a cycle thanks to day-night changes and it even causes macro cycles of mass movement in the air and water.  So it's not immediately obvious to me that my thesis is correct.  I need to show how the moon's cyclical force has an effect that is different from the Sun.  Now that life has arisen, the Sun's energy is obviously being used more than the effect of the moon.  

My shaking container analogy may be exactly what's occurring: the Sun does not shake the matter on Earth like the moon.  It's just a lot more heating. But the moon kept the Earth's mantle in a "shaking" state in it's first 1 billion if not 4 billion years, far longer than it otherwise would have been.  This should have brought a wider variety of atoms and compounds to the top and distributed in more interesting ways. An interesting crystal can't form as the environment cools if the atoms are not in the right place to begin with. And so it may have been with life.  Maybe life is just how atoms on Earth are cooling off after being placed in low-entropy arrangements thanks to the moon.

The first places we look for life in the solar system are similar bodies (Io and Titan?) where similar cyclical gravitational forces are at work, churning tides of gases, liquids, and/or mantles, creating a lot of interesting "chaos" that may lead to life.

It's very interesting that the 3rd grandest object known to cave men has always been idolized as a symbol of romance. It seems likely that it is indeed the crucial extra ingredient that made romance possible. No doubt the Earth is important. No doubt the Sun currently drives it. But was it the exotic after-effect, the moon, of the striking of two planetoids that made us interesting and interested?

"Replication" seems to be crucial to making life interesting. I would be good if I could find how the moon (or moon in concert with sun) is important to that aspect. But as I implied above "replication" or "spreading" might be a red herring. It may be that it is merely a consequence of the lowering of entropy. Pseudo-copies are kind of a requirement in lowering entropy. As when we go to tighter packing arrangements in the container analogy, more arrangements are going to be more frequent. As the tightest bonds get stuck as a result of the moon's cyclical force, the result is a smaller variety of bonds you might encounter, or rather you will encounter the tightest bonds more frequently than chance alone. So copies being more frequent is a logical consequence, not a fictitious end goal of "selfish" genes. But the copies in life are enzymatic. That is, they "assist" the moon and Sun, through no force of their own, to "make", through no force of their own, copies. But in what way is a spreading, reproducing chain of restaurants and its business and architectural blueprints enzymatic? It seems to be the exact same kind of process and yet it seems a lot less "enzymatic". By reducing the mysterious feel of enzymes, I hope to increase the potential importance of the moon.

The rest of this post is a meandering of "thinking out loud", if the above was not already so.

The stronger bonds that potentially lower the net entropy on Earth are also an increase in the mass via E=mc^2. That extra energy or mass originally comes from the Sun or the Earth's rotation (or radioactive decay inside the Earth). If it comes from the Earth's rotation, then it's not a net increase in Earth's energy or mass. But the photons released by the Sun were trying to escape the solar system and allow the universe to expand, but as they are caught by photosynthesis or other processes mass that was in the Sun is transferred to the Earth. I suppose the gravitons to and from the moon are a similar attempt of entropic forms of energy trying to escape, so I don't really have point except to note that there's another difference between the energy from the Sun and moon that might have some significance.

The resulting higher-energy bonds that life seeks deprives the universe of (I believe) and entropy of S=4/3 U/T (or the nearly equivalent dS=dQ/T) where U (or dQ) is the amount of energy from the Sun or moon's external forces that were 100% converted to stronger bonds on Earth instead of being emitted as black-body radiation. Entropy of the universe is actually known to be constant on a co-moving volume basis. See the foot note for a full explanation on how entropy in gravitational systems are required (by cosmological observation and the standard model) to exhibit a reduction in entropy as the universe expands. I'm claiming that if we could 100% convert the Sun's energy to stronger and stronger bonds of our local mass at "0" degrees kelvins so that no U leaves our system, then we would be preventing some of the Universe from expanding. Wasting energy seems to be "anti-life" (more entropy).

Foot note:
The 2nd law is incorrectly stated as “entropy always increases” and for decades popular books have incorrectly proclaimed there will be a "heat death" of the Universe.  The idea that "entropy always increases" is an engineering idealization that is useful for designing engines.  But due to black body radiation, there is no such thing as an isolated system. See the famous physicist Richard Feynman’s chapter on thermodynamics where he explains "entropy always increases" is not correct and gives the standard, correct equation. The Universe (in observation and the standard model) has constant entropy on a comoving volume basis which means all gravitational systems inside a "fixed volume" are perpetually emitting entropy to the universe “in order for the universe to expand”. See the Steven Weinberg’s famous book “The first 3 minutes” about how conservation of entropy overrides even conservation of energy in the standard model of the universe.  As internal energy is converted to heat, 4/3 U/T entropy is emitted to the Universe via black body radiation.

amazon review of 5x5 rubiks cube

This is a great cube.  As an engineer, I'm really impressed by the design and quality.  I always have a complaint about product design, but I could not find any flaws in this.

Do not pay attention to the reviewer who said it came apart. It is not possible to take it apart without a screwdriver.  The center caps can be popped off with your fingernail to reveal the screw inside, one on each side.  You tighten the screws to make it a "tighter" cube.  As with other cubes from this manufacturer, I needed to make 1 to 2 turns on those screws to tighten the cube up.  It really is too flexible when you get it.

The colors are just as vibrant and nice as the picture shows.

I'm very enthralled by this 5x5 that I seem to have lost all interest in my 3x3. I wanted a 4x4 but figured my son would be more impressed with a 5x5 (he was), but now I am very happy I got the harder one.

The instructions are great becaus e they're so awful.  The bad "Engrish" and the challenge in trying to figure them out was fun and challenging. I specifically refrained from trying to do a web search to get good instructions.  "When we recover the centre block we will meet some problem, but normally have two condition. Recover the center block is agile step. You lean these 2 formular must think it's thinking." The instructions made it 3x harder than it should be.  I could really only understand the 4 patterns (the engrish was either superfluous or too bad) and one of the images is wrong, so I had to apply the patterns to see what happened.  Then I had to use a little but of thinking to get the pieces in the right place so that the 4 patterns could always be used.  Also, for what they call the 2nd step, (the 3rd of the 4 formulas) I had to apply the mirror image (or some type of "inverse") of the pattern for half of the pieces.  So after an hour I had the 4 patterns figured out.

Summary of solving:
===============
2 patterns of 7 moves each applied to "middle" pieces (not the corners, not the sides). Each pattern is applied about 10 times each (20 move) because there are 48 of the middle pieces and you can easily solve the first grouping (or two) without the patterns and ~30% of the remaining pieces are in place by luck.

1 pattern of 7 moves, and it's mirror image, applied to get the 3 side pieces (that make up each side) together for each of the 12 sides. Barely 25% seem to be in place by luck, so (100% - 25%) x 12 x 2 =~ 18 times.  (you apply it to 2 of the 3 side pieces, for each side)

1 pattern of 15 moves applied about 6 times to the sides to orient  ~50% of the 12 sides that are not oriented correctly by luck. If you mess up, you have to go back to and apply step 1 and 2 several times, then all of step 3, losing 10 minutes of work.

Now solve like a 3x3

There seems to be a lot of room for figuring out ways to reduce the amount of times the first 2 patterns need to be applied. So there's plenty of room for fun invention.

Here's more detail on solving.

The first 3 patterns are pretty simple.  The 4th one is challenging and took me about 20 times before I remembered it well enough to not make a mistake.  After solving it 10 times this weekend, I'm down to 16 minutes, and I do not know if I can make a lot of improvement.  I can solve a 3x3 in 80 seconds using the most basic method.  40 seconds is my record on 3x3 due to some luc I still need to look at the 4th pattern to keep me on track (it's 15 moves, most of them a half turn).  Someone else said he does it in 7 minutes. k.

After you apply the 4 patterns you have it organized in a way so that you can solve the rest like a 3x3.  So it adds only 4 patterns to the 5 I use for a regular 3x3 (not counting 2 "mirror" moves of the 5 that I sometimes use to speed things up, and the 6 or so simple moves I use to get the initial white layer)

another comment on one of nick szabo's article

in response to
https://unenumerated.blogspot.nl/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html


Since the early adopters stand to profit enormously, I would not say bitcoin is socially scalable in all aspects. This gives rise to a wealthy class (Satoshi being the prime example) that Adam Smith said should have their wealth taxed away (because they gained wealth without labor). Later writers generalized Smith's complaints about the land-renting aristocracy and large capitalists forming monopolies and "lobbies" to include natural monopolies and unearned interest on loans.  Unearned interest on a loan is even worse in our Dutch-english type of loan as opposed to German-type. The difference between a dutch-english loan and a stock investment is that the loaner is not concerned with the outcome of the business venture. With collateral its head's I win and you win or break even and tails I win and you lose, excepting bankruptcies and housing crisis destroying collateral value. Anyway, if there is a class who can lend out a non-inflationary money at interest with little fear of loss, and more than live off that interest, the logical end result is a 1% class. But not just that, what happens if there is any type of wealth accumulation and everyone is require by law or convention to base the ownership or temporary control of all assets in society in that currency?  By definition, an accumulation  requires a loss of relative wealth by some other party if they tried to only live off their labor. By not investing more in the "machine" they and/or their children lose compared to other people. Maybe that's good and simply survival of the fittest, but I'm not sure. The escape for the masses getting less and less of of the total wealth by trying to live off of wages instead of engaging in the "savings war" is to abandon the currency, just like empire currencies eventually have to be abandoned. The non-working non-skilled wealthy would then lose its cheap slaves. The bitcoin "ponzi scheme" ends. He who gets in early and gets out before the fall is the winner, not having not ever having done anything beneficial for society. But maybe the machines will figure out how to force us to accept on this one currency so that we work more efficiently (i.e. we work harder for less money). Economizing means doing more with less, not optimizing human happiness. The recent increase in human happiness which might just be an odd recent result of the fossil fuel influx.  Anyway, the focus on savings in a non-inflationary coin like bitcoin is supposed to cause a deflationary spiral until a different currency is adopted. I never see anyone addressing these problems.

posted comment to one of nick szabo's articles

This is a comment posted to Nick Szabo's article:
https://unenumerated.blogspot.nl/2017/03/collecting-metal-inner-and-outer-worlds.html


The "sound money" you've described I would call "forms of money based on efficient barter that works even in anarchy".

The "treasure" category carries value (as you've described before) based on some kind of "order" produced by the objects uniqueness (including history) and/or difficulty in creating it (via skill x time). The skill could be physical and/or intellectual, including a smart understanding of the target audience's desires.

But the "government fiat money" category to me is an advancement & simplification exposing a secondary essence of money, not a setback or unavoidable cheat by powers that be. The purpose of efficient barter is to make sure the trade is honest, resulting in stronger economic individuals & stronger societies. But protocols (law) that can be employed to enforce a reduction in cheats where a fair trade is not easily determinable by the parties in the exchange. I propose most needed trades can't be easily determined to be honest. Worse, many trades can be bad for society as a whole while optimal for the parties at the exchange. So we invented government to enforce laws. But to enforce laws & keep them in "sync", it seems a single money for a single government was needed. I am reminded of economic agents in an A.I. exchanging a currency in order to buy CPU time & memory space. The use of energy in CPU time is kinetic joules & the storage of bits in memory space is the storage of potential joules. The kinetic energy in our economics is oil/gas/solar/etc. The potential energy is gold,copper,buildings roads, etc. Another form of value I'm skipping is intellectual value of the law, building designs, & programs that run iPads, etc. They do not seem to be the same kind of "treasure" mentioned above, but they both are an intellectual property.

So to make a large system optimal in at least terms of strength, a higher level of intelligence beyond anarchistic efficient barter has won human wars: large centralized governments with a single legal money. Democracy aside, it seems to have achieved this via getting all the laws "on the same page" to create a coherent body via a single money.

Cryptography & technology may make governments obsolete only in name: there will still be some kind of system-wide governing (aka a protocol) we will choose to join that optimizes trade & (more importantly) the goals of a society. The possibility of choice in our governance will advance the fittest which may make all the difference in the world. In the end, biology will be replaced by machine. The current extinction rate & expected stopping of population growth shows the trend.

As a cyclical force acting on an closed (not isolated) thermodynamic system, the moon lowers entropy. It creates order that has been crucial for life & the concentration of ores in the mantle. For example of this thermo effect, you can randomly drop balls into a jar they will not be very efficiently pack especially if they are different sizes or shapes. If you shake the jar, they pack more efficiently which lowers the entropy (the cyclic energy injected comes out as heat while the mass inside is constant). It seems to be allowing mass on the surface of the Earth to congeal via our economics. Metals, silicon, & carbon fiber are created by removing oxygen from "ores" which results in a lower specific entropy per mass of the material. It joins our governed economic system for better command & control. It leads to more efficient thinking machines (CPUs control electrons where brains are stuck with molecules) & more efficient use of sunlight (solar cells are 20x more efficient than photosynthesis). Harder materials are lower entropy due to fewer possible states at a given temperature. They are more static (log-lived) & controllable. The released O2 gas increases entropy, offsetting the reduction, so Earth-wide it may not be a reduction. There is lower entropy per mass of our economic system as we switch from biology to machines.

======
The point I would like to make is that you seem to be dismissing or neglecting fiat money. And yet, I believe you are the inventor of "smart contracts". Fiat money seems to be the simplified form of money that exposes the importance of contracts (which are limited and enforced by a higher-level of contracts called the governing law). A single contract unto itself is meaningless. It's importance is like the importance of having more than 1 economic agent. Contracts, like agents, must interact for a higher goal. Isn't a single currency important in such a system? For example, if the total currency represents total fluid control of the society's assets, and is printed or contracted with the economy in order to keep prices and wages stable, then a single unit (like the dollar) would represent a fixed percent control of the fluid assets. So with a stable currency to match available fluid assets under control of the assets, then the contracts can remain valid in time and space in terms of that unit. This idealized for simplicity and I'm avoiding the importance of mild inflation to prevent "loaning" hoarders ("rentiers" in classical economics) gaining interminable control of others without labor. 

A Physics Speculation: 1D space as the past, 1D time as the future

Warning: this includes many factual and intuitive ideas that try to make connections between thought and physics.  Landauer's principle shows one if not the central basis of the connection. I always try to be exact, efficient, and correct. Sometimes my reasoning and presentation just fall apart.  But it is not easy to identify when. I do not have the energy or desire (since these are notes to self, not just to the world) to take out or refine the trash and hope you will try to take it all seriously at first before discarding a paragraph as an example of my confusion or inattention.  I hope the imaginative aspects will be understood and appreciated.  I am always trying to explain ideas I have not seen elsewhere, otherwise you could just do a Google search. This means I am often trying to break from established "facts" like the belief that entropy always increases (this is not true as established by cosmology and the great physicist Richard Feynman as I have explained before). The most important ideas are the ones that are new  and therefore are harder to grasp or appreciate when they are read.  If a sentence is correctly parsed it does not mean the importance has been grasped. This is all the more true if you are incredulous. I regret and warn that sometimes you need to be. But even if an imaginative idea is factually wrong, logically inconsistent, and badly presented, it may be useful to have it go into your bag of imaginative tricks.


All logic can be reduced to the placement or interaction of 1's and 0's which are just "yes/no" or "true/false". Boole showed this in the 1800's. 

Geometry was the first "math" that went beyond addition, subtraction, and multiplication.  The ink is 1's and the space is 0's. The ink holding firm on the paper is for letting the paper keep a good memory of the things being claimed. The logic of stories, law, and advanced math still use the ink on the paper as a memory and syntax rules for the valid ways in which the ink can interact with itself, across the space of the paper. 

The physical objects we see in space are also a rigid memory. The relationship between the objects is largely defined by the space between them.  Unlike geometry, law, and math, the object relationships in space are changing in time, as if the ink on the paper is moving around, according to additional syntax rules.

But there is a rigid relationship between time and space. We have units for energy which we now know is the same unit as mass, specially E=mc^2.  But that's not exactly right.  The correct formula is E= -mc^2 (with the negative sign, they are equal and opposite).  Or rather, the E+mc^2=0.   Similarly it is not exactly meters=seconds anymore than energy=mass.  Obviously there is something different.  The exact relationship is meters = SQRT(-1) * c * seconds.   Also, space is 3D and time is 1D.  Or rather, the position of objects in the 3D changes with time.  But the 3D is a consequence of us having a 6-layered brain.  To solve 3D of rotation and 3D of velocity, our brains needed to have 6 layers of neurons in the cortex in the same way you need 6 equations to solve 6 unknowns.  The process of learning since or before birth or even hard-wired develops the 6 equations we use for the rest of our life to conceive of objects with mass when we are presented with 6 data points of rotation and velocity.  What I'm getting at is that the newish "holographic" view of the universe that attempts to say 2D is more accurate than 3D is still 1D short.  Physics should always be reduced to the simplistic but complete form, and 1D of space should be sufficient. Objects are no longer objects with mass in 1D, but just more like the 1's occurring in the midst of 0's along a single line.  There are patterns to the sequence.  Our 6-layered brain is made useful by the existence of those patterns. If they were random, 6 layers would not have any use.  To see 4D space in 1D time we would need 10-layered brains and the mass we would perceive in that world would be related but very different.  Everything with velocity in 3D is static in 4D.  And everything with acceleration in 3D is a velocity in 4D.  It would be E=-mc^3 instead of E=-mc^2. 

But my point is this:  There appears to be a "space-line" of 1's and 0's (whatever that means) that we call the past that underlies our perceptions.  Space is the past.  Time is the future.  I said meters=i*c*seconds.  But a little math can restate this as seconds = -i / c*meters.  So seconds might be the negative of meters (scaled by "c" and times "i").  That is, our perception is standing at the origin of a "timeline" or "spaceline" where our position is = 0.  And from there goes a positive sequence of 1, 2, 3 with each spot in that sequence of 1D "space" a 1 or a 0. That would be our 3D space converted to 1D space and is strictly a recording of our past. The positive sequence of 1's and 0's is what we perceive as objects in space at this moment of the origin.  They are a recording or perception of our past that determine via logical consistency what is possible for our future.      And the negative numbers on this "space-time-line" is the future of 1's and 0's about to unfold.  And maybe EVERY possible sequence is unfolding, which creates the many-world's interpretation of quantum mechanics.   "i" in engineering and physics is always used when it is describing something that "varies".  In this case the "i" might be stating the next value can be 1 or 0.  If you do not know the value, you use "i" in it's place.  The space-time-line might be more properly a sequence of SQRT(1) and SQRT(-1) or +1 and -1.  0 and 1 in Boolean logic are not really values, but simply signify there are 2 possibilities.

As I've posted previously, the expanding universe is extracting entropy out of gravitational systems in order to keep a constant entropy per expanding (comoving) volume of space.  The entropy that leaves a gravitational system might be a record of what path the system took.  Since mass is the negative of energy, there is no creation of energy with a many-world's view.

Transaction fees should govern all aspects of a cryptocurrency

In response to a wired article:

Instead of voting based on ownership of tokens, voting should be based on amount of fees paid in transactions. Those USING the coin as a CURRENCY, would then get to decide its design and future. If you view transaction fees as "taxes" to support the "governing" of the coin and how transactions are handled and paid for, then those who pay the most in taxes (transaction fees) should get the strongest voice in directing the future of the coin. "Pay to vote" sounds ugly because it sounds like a lobby, but it's not the same. The transactions fees conducting the voting is a real market-place legitimate force. No one other than the market place should be influencing the coin design and even new-coin production rate. Not developers, not nodes (basically the banks), and especially not miners. Marketplace voters based on fees paid is even smarter than a democratic vote where an infrequent user of the coin would get the same vote as a frequent user. In this scheme, it's a democratic currency instead of an oligarchical asset like bitcoin. Transaction fees as a percent transferred would cut down on day trading and on micro-payments that are not carrying their weight. Currencies are meant to be fluid assistants to marketplace transactions, not assets to be hoarded like bitcoin.
We will not have a good cryptocurrency until the transaction fees dictate all aspects of the coin, especially coin quantity and coin release rate. Programmers and stakeholder should never make decisions regarding a currency. The distributed marketplace should be the supreme unquestioned leader of developers, miners, and nodes, not their hapless victim. When it's functioning like this, you will find the coin will have a stable value and not reward early adopters. Greed and ignorance is what's stopping the emergence of an intelligent peer-to-peer cryptocoin.