Thoughts at Random

The main idea: two joint cryptocurrencies are programmed such that one can be exchanged for the other as long as their product remains constant, thus tracking the minimal necessary volume of circulation required by a growing economy in a decentralized fashion.  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 30.09.2021, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form. 1 The issue 1.1 The only credible challenger to the current system of a centralised issuer of currency would be a decentralised system under the auspices of cryptocurrency. Alas, most of the time, the designers of these ingenious tools just went with “fixed supply is good enough” and left it at that, making cryptocurrency a great store of value, but a shonky unit of account. And how much worse this issue becomes when the user base is growing faster than the global economy (which of course it does)! 1.2 I’ve earlier e...

The main idea: Fred Gohlke’s idea of iteratively setting up groups of 3 people who vote on each-other’s progression to ever-higher tiers presents the only credible alternative to liberal democracy. 0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 22.11.2021, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form. 0.1 The Tryptic Model of elections featured in part 2 of this post is not mine at all, but was devised by Fred Gohlke as practical democracy , to which system I'm making relatively minor changes mechanics-wise and explaining in my own words below. Still, though the system is almost unchanged, the context to which I apply Gohlke's idea couldn't be more different, the original tweak to empower real democracy here made into a full alternative to liberal democracy. Thus, all resulting errors, departures from the original design or broader implications readers may choose to dr...

The main idea: the concept of the efficient frontier can be generalized such as to allow the rank-ordering of extremely complex datasets based on a large set of mutually contradicting criteria. 0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 24.01.2022, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.   1.1 Say you have a list of things you’d like to compare with regards to a number of criteria. Obviously, if all things are such as to be ranked in the same order across all of these criteria, comparisons are easy. What to do when entities are ranked differently with regards to different criteria though? 1.2 To make this less esoteric, let’s take a simple example: I wish to purchase a used vehicle, and the only relevant considerations are its price (the lower the better), its production year (the more recent the better) and its mileage (the lower the better). I have this narro...

The main idea: include all conflicting transactions in a block and check competing blockchains for mutual domination to achieve near immediate transactions finality  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 03.02.2025, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  1.1 Since we’re after shaving time, you start by taking the Proof of Work out of the blockchain. You still need to hash the block’s contents with its predecessor’s hash to establish a sequence, but there are no further requirements made of the hash itself. This will become important for efficiently checking long chains soon. 1.2 Next, you allow all potentially double-spent transactions to be included in the chain without rendering the chain invalid. You still omit transactions that are invalid due to issues with signatures or whatnot, but if you have two otherwise valid transactions that rely on the same ...

The main idea: iteratively replacing the highest deviating cell in a reserving triangle with the expected result for that cell removes without ignoring abnormally large claims.  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 27.10.2021, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.   1.1 In a previous post I discussed a general method for removing outliers from a dataset given that one has a model. Let's try now to apply this to non-life claims reserving by triangles. 1.2 The cumulated triangle below includes one obvious outlier incurred in 2018, and emerging one year after. 1.3 Having a model of the data arranged in triangle form means breaking down the triangle into a vertical (exposure) and horizontal (pattern) component. These two are dependent on the choice of reserving method, with the additive method being an obvious example of splitting the triangle into two dim...

The main idea: the area under an assumed linear demand curve is a far better approximation of utility gains than current GDP accounting practices.  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This post was originally posted on 04.11.2021, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.   1 The Nominal 1.1 I was inspired to think of this when reading this post (h/t Astral Codex Ten ). All of the relevant critique of the post itself can be found in the comments, but it helped me realize there is something off with real GDP as a measure of standard of life. I will take the opposite view of Less Wrong though, and state that real GDP accounting overestimates gains in standard of life. 1.2 Let's take a simple economy that only produces and consumes widgets. I am not interested in nominal – real distinctions here, so I need not assume any more than one product class, and will stick to inflation not being a thi...