Where are the central bank haters?

The Plaza
#1

There are large segments of society that harbour resentment and heartfelt disapproval of the role central banks play in society. Many complain that they fund war. Others demand transparency. Others complain about the ridiculous credit bubbles they have created by fixing the price of money far below market rates. They cry “stop the senseless war”, “audit the Fed” and look with disapproval at the tremendous market distortions that result from central bank price fixing of borrowed money. And when they have had a therapeutic dose of complaining, they immediately turn their attention to acquiring as much of this despised central bank money as possible.

I share all the concerns about central banks just mentioned, but I didn’t complain. I enlisted all of you to build an alternative. One that can’t fund war. One that is radically transparent in all of its dealings. One that can’t fix the price of money.

By succeeding in creating a public money system that can’t fund war, is radically transparent and can’t fix lending rates or pump credit bubbles, I would dare say NuBits is the most ethical and socially responsible monetary authority on the planet. While I understand our growth must be fundamentally driven by creating value for customers, I thought we would get a lot of early lift and momentum from people who wanted to see an alternative to central banks prosper and thrive. I thought some of the people who are so critical of central banks would rally around our very practical and functional alternative. So, I would like to ask the community to discuss why we haven’t enjoyed more support from people who oppose central banks and how we can enlist these people in our cause.

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#2

Maybe they believe that Nu is not a solution because it seems to be dependent on the very central banks we are trying to get away from. This is something I’ve never understood and it would be great if you could clear it up. As the founder of Nu, I would rather hear your opinion on it rather than others.

How is Nu supposed to surpass central banks if we’re ultimately tied to them through pegging? Is it true that central banks like the Federal Reserve still need to exist in order for Nu to peg to their currencies? Is there any possible way that Nu could completely take over the roles that they play in society? How would it be possible to replace them if we require their currencies for pegging?

From what I understand, people rally around Bitcoin because it is not dependent on current central banks and could potentially replace them. You’d have to convince them the same is true of Nu. Is it possible for Nu to exist without pegging? If not, then we’re ultimately dependent on the currencies managed by central banks, correct?

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#3

Here, here! :wave:

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#4

I’ve always been a fan of NuBTC:
NuBTC

But basically we can peg to whatever we want. We can make new products with different pegs, but we can also straight up change the USNBT peg to another peg. The only thing that states the value of the peg is agreement amongst the network.

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#5

For more info on the “price of money” fixing, I recommend the documentary Money for Nothing currently available on Netflix.

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#6

No. The network can regulate the value of its currencies in any manner for which there is consensus. A currency could be pegged to some sort of price index, for instance. But right now everyone lives in a world of government currency, so the degree of stability our currencies possess will be judged by how much they vary in value versus the dominant form of money, which could be the US dollar, Euro or Yuan, depending on the context.

That depends on if you look at NuBits as a blockchain or a protocol. Our blockchain is unlikely to ever become the global reserve currency. However, the protocol, or important elements of it, are much more likely to see broad distribution. My vision isn’t so much that NuBit use will expand and displace central bank money entirely. What is more likely, and much better in terms of societal stability, is that NuBits will continue to grow in use. As they do, central banks will take notice. We have already seen the beginnings of this with David Andolfatto, Vice President of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, having publicly advocated the Federal Reserve implement a dollar pegged cryptocurrency. Being small, NuBits is agile and can evolve quickly. The Federal Reserve has many advantages in this competition, but being agile and moving quickly aren’t among them. That means innovation will come from us. As we create a system that can’t fund war, is radically transparent and doesn’t cause resource misallocation as a result of manipulating the cost of borrowing, that will increase the pressure on central banks to do the same while giving them a tool set to do it. They will have to address these issues to maintain their market share. And so they will.

This should not be interpreted as a promise to shareholders, but rather a vision articulated about how this might proceed, so that people here can coordinate their actions to evoke the scenario. Whether our experiment can proceed in this way is not known at this time, but there is good reason to believe it is possible.

We innovate to create a monetary system that remedies many of the defects of central banks. Being under public pressure to resolve those defects, central banks adopt our innovations. However, they cannot or don’t desire to fully implement all the advantages of our system. As they adopt our innovations, it just gives us attention as the system that is superior. Take the issue of decentralised share ownership, for instance. They probably consider that to be a problem and they won’t decentralise ownership. So Fedcoin gets criticised as a defective version of the real thing (NuBits) by some. Fedcoin could change the rules at any time, whereas surprises are unlikely to come from decentralised NuShare holders. We still have our market because there are still important advantages to NuBits over Fedcoins. We ought to keep in mind how vastly tiny our market share is right now. The US dollar M2 money supply is currently 17 million times what ours is. Reducing that to a mere 1 million times would create windfall profits for us. Any indication from a central bank that we are a center of innovation that central banks are interested in can increase our market share. For that reason, I say to central banks interested in developing Fedcoin: we have completed your implementation and you may have all the source code right here. Just run a find and replace on NuBits to change it to Fedcoin. In all seriousness, if central bank software architects analyze the best technical approach to Fedcoin, they are likely to decide to start with our code base.

Circling back to Sentinelrv’s question about whether we can completely take central banks’ market share, I think that as soon as we begin to take a little market share, central banks will react by trying to adopt our innovations to stop the loss and maintain their own market share. Rather than defeat central banks, we should reinvent them in our own image in this way. We provide a superior example, then watch them become more like us. We won’t get the whole pie, but it will be a good slice, and all the other slices will look more like ours.

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#7

I imagine that even central banks depend on their currency’s price compared to other fiat currencies to keep its value stable, meaning that they are basically interested in their currency as importing and exporting mean of exchange.

Do central banks care about their currency’s purchasing power stability? If so could this be done in Nu?

#8

"built it and they will come"
we are building it :wink:

1 Like
#9

I will just remind everyone that up until recently bitcoin was still the entire focus when it came to cryptocurrencies. Now the discussion is finally moving towards blockchains as a technology rather than bitcoin as the one true blockchain. Not long before that bitcoin was still considered libertariantard-terrorist-pedo-druggie currency. They launched it in 2009 and that was the “mass media” consensus regarding the technology. It took five years for people to wade through the ad-hominems just to consider the technology as relevant. I think it was sometime before Nu launched when Overstock.com actually accepted it for purchases and it was a really big gamble for a company to be promoting the preferred technology of libertariantard-terrorist-pedo-druggies.

So, we’re about a year and a half into our journey. Not even halfway past the period bitcoin went through to be considered a viable technology. When bitcoin was around for our current launch duration they were dealing with people hacking the protocol to create hundreds of billions of bitcoins. They took some hard hits and got back up to earn their market cap. Thankfully we aren’t chasing bugs like that, but we still need a lot of time and effort to prove the implementation is viable. As a tool and investment. Some other things I think are going against us:

  1. Proof-of-Stake is still a dirty word to a lot of existing crypto people. Maybe ethereum switching over to PoS will change that notion but as of right now there’s still a lot of people that aren’t over the PoW hump.
  2. The distribution method will always haunt us. IPO’s haunt every project. It would be interesting if we could reactivate the PoW mechanism we inherited from Peercoin to let shareholders vote on periods where the PoW mechanism would be enabled. Obviously this would inflate the NSR supply but it would interest people to download the client and try to get a stake of Nu in a decentralized way. Not a short term solution to breaking the initial distribution but over time it could attract a lot more people and lessen the blow.
  3. Nu is incredibly hard to understand. It seems like every week a select group of people on the forum are coming up with a new acronym to vote on. How can people join in on the business if nobody can get an overview of how to get running along with this full speed train? It’s not like dogecoin where the process is buy dogecoins on some exchange and then start giving it out to everyone you know while shitposting memes on /r/dogecoin.
  4. We seriously lack a development community around the project. Bitcoin has developers rolling over themselves to try and get their proposals and commits into the main repo. All for free… Ethereum has basically swooped in and tore away anyone slightly interested in crypto programming to work on their various smart contract languages and interpreters. Meanwhile we’re struggling to find someone who will build an OSX version of the core client for us.

There are some things under the control of the community to resolve above, and some other things that simply are out of our control. Bottom line the first step to becoming a successful venture is to survive. That is why bitcoin is successful. Second is to finds ways of incentivizing people to get involved while also making it easy to do so.

There’s probably more to it than this but I just wanted to share my immediate thoughts on the matter.

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#10

I am with coingame on:

The hard to understand bit splits into two groups:

  1. Nu as the network, which is indeed for many a bridge too far. On the other hand there are not that many people who know how the FEDs work, so I’m not too worried about it. More transparency and documentation is important though, so those who dive into it come out with confidence. The FEDs trust was not build overnight and many still don’t trust them. It is about levels of trust and confidence. Nu being you has a road ahead of it to build that confidence and trust.
    We need to explain why people can trust NuShareholders to manage the network properly in a way their funds are secure now and long term.

  2. NuBits as a cryptocurrency. I’ve been trying it out, many issues we have you can also find with Bitcoin. The average user doesn’t fully understand the concept yet and the adoption rates are relatively low. The advantage of a NuBit against a Euro or a dollar is hard to express to average Joe living in Europe or the US with a bank account. The banking sector still beats us in convenience and assurance. I believe as soon as we are able to assure certain amounts of NuBits against frauds or user error like the banks and the FEDs do when they have another security issue or hack.

The national banks even insure up to certain amounts in case a local bank goes bust (bail-outs). It should be a lot cheaper to assure NuBits than the banking infrastructure, we just haven’t found a way to do this properly.
Until more insurances can be put in place (more trust) then NuBits will only be used in niche markets. That won’t be enough to survive in the long term imo.

Having said that, we are just 1.5 year around. The basic Bitcoin technology itself a few years longer. Just remember how the first plane or car looked like or the first internet pages in the 90s and how it was used. I believe that especially the buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT), smart contracts and bots will be interesting. Devices who will be able to use cryptocurrencies on behalf of the owner. We are just scratching the surface in that area.

3 Likes
#11

BTW what happened to the official Nu Youtube (“Nutube”) channel?

Some simple (and easy to understand) tutorial videos and videos showing how Nu works would be great!

Edit: Youtube must not be underestimated, it’s an endless source of potential people watching and getting interested in this project.

2 Likes
#12

I still don’t quite get why we took the “introducing nubits” video offline.

Everytime a friend asks me “What the hell are you doing there?” I have to start with the “What is Bitcoin?” videos and take it from there… not very satisfying.

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#13

I think Nu is still far below the radar of too many.
But articles like www.alt-m.org/2015/12/28/theoretical-fedcoin-meet-operational-nubits/ help changing that over time.

If a project that claims about itself being

there’s hope that this will change over time.

#14

This:

I don’t understand the point of pegging anything to a fiat currency when you can create a currency that has better characteristics and can outcompete even a 100% gold and silver back currency. Makes no sense…

or

I really don’t like the idea of a manipulated currency. It is already ugly enough to see China devaluing Yuan to play with US, Brazilian government indebting Petrobrás(state company) to control inflation. I really want to stay away from this.
I keep an eye on my digital balances all the time, if I realize some coin I hold is devaluing in an abnormal way, I just switch to another one, no need to peg… Since I know a little about technical analysis and I always keep an eye on the news and the fundamentals, I don’t think I will be taken by surprise on a huge drop.

from the comments in How an Open-Source ‘Federal Reserve’ is Run: Nubits’ Pascal Hideki Hamonic

#15

I definitely agree with this. Visibility is extremely important in my opinion. Just a quick example: I bet that still 90% of the people that invested into Ethereum have no clue what it is about. I read the documentation available and still was hesitant to invest back then. Once I found out that they are globally represented at pretty much any conference and put tremendous efforts into publicity, I decided to invest. I know that sounds amateurish as hell from an investor’s perspective, but I felt very confident that the reach they produced will pay off for early investors.
And at the time before the release they certainly sold nothing more but an insane vision, at least from the perspective of most of those considering to put money into it. And selling a vision is fine if there is a product behind it that provides at least some substance for the vision to potentially become reality. They reinforced their vision and good intentions over and over and over again.
Maybe we should get a really convincing and straight to the point presentation, stating our vision and having a map where we could go in the future. I think such a presentation is important to demonstrate consistency in the content making sure that the message comes across that we as a network want to come across. And also, shouldn’t we consider rewarding highly motivated individuals from our community that represent us at conferences or other venues in their country? I really liked @crypto_coiner taking the initiative here, thumbs up again because that can’t be taken for granted. True, @JordanLee, isn’t it? Most, if not all of the genius architects here want to stay anonymous. Of course, we can’t expect a sudden increase in interest from one single presentation. But we should put more focus on that from time to time I believe.
All those cryptos ranking high on CMC definitely undertook wayyyyy more visibility efforts than we did.
I am totally fine with the way Nu thinks and works and hopes :slight_smile: but people often don’t take time in our crypto sector to find out what really potentially is a great long term product or investment. It took me quite a long time to join you guys and also quite a lot of thoughts and creativity in the sense that I wanted to understand how far Nu could go in the future. And being a creative thinker or believer is exciting while putting your money into a project. Ethereum did exactly that. They provided enough information for those who have no clue about the code or the implications to get excited by consistently presenting their idea in public.
I also read that stuff on reddit about why is Nushares a good/bad investment. I actually didn’t want to comment on it, especially on the stuff that “coinaday” wrote - not worth the effort. I have high demands when it comes to integrity, and for that reason I have two considerable investments in crypto projects that I really care for: Nushares and Blockshares. The other stuff I do in crypto is gambling and (more or less successfully :wink: ) exploiting herd behavior. I am 10000000% certainly not part of the Nu network to make a quick buck because Nu doesn’t stand for quick bucks, and that is something we as a community have achieved over quite some time now. And we shouldn’t be afraid of harming our position by stating the positive things about our project. I am saying this because we will meet even more "coinaday"s in the future. But to be honest, the way he presented his opinion, which was full of contradictions from many perspectives, just made me grin on the one hand, and a little bit sad on the other hand. How on earth can I attack a project like Nushares in such a harsh tone in the crypto environment that consists of 95% scams? Seriously, I don’t care about that guy. We might not succeed, he is absolutely right. But Nu went far beyond many other crypto projects. That is merely going beyond the plain idea itself (many projects consist of an idea only because coming up with ideas to rip people off is easy) and put working code into action step by step.
As a bottom line, we are dependent on a growing community and I feel that we must undertake efforts to increase our visibility and the comprehensibility of our project/products.
I know that rewarding people for representing us will mean a dilution to the current network. But as @Nagalim and @masterOfDisaster have stated very often: doing business does not first come with a profit. It first comes with cost. And we must decide what efforts we want to undertake apart from coding only to make Nu a (faster) success.
I am all for investing into well-considered initiatives. And to be honest, I would even support a motion that dilutes the network by 10% if there is a thoroughly considered business development or marketing plan behind it.
As of today, it might be the right thing to wait for BCExchange to be completed. But maybe we should even go on marketing beast mode slightly before that. And from my side, we can definitely stick to presenting the positive aspects of Nu. Someone calling for a 10 K for a DAO, Jesus Christ…
The timing for marketing is incredibly important. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think we have enough substance to offer to reasonably present our project and our vision? I believe so.
Checkout DAOhub.org. I don’t know what they are going to do and I didn’t have time to read through it. I just read something about “new era of governance” or so. It reminded me of us :wink: So far they raised 12 million dollars in a few days and the IPO is going on for several more weeks.

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#16

Oh and by the way: the 12 million dollars do not represent a share in the network itself. They are only for use, comparable to ether I think. Without having read everything, doing an IPO with the title “new era of governance” or whatever and not giving people a share in the company sounds like totally missing the point. My statement might be ill-considered because I am not well informed. But at a first glance it sounds weird to me. Better stick to Nu.

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#17

I think Nu collaborates with the FEDs.
FEDs did a relatively good job over the last decades to keep FIAT money stable at least year after year.
Nu uses their know how to offer a stable crypto for the crypto world.
The FEDs haters use their currencies every day…

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#18

Short answer: the terminology used in the video will be very confusing for users as we transition to US NuBits, Chinese NuBits, and beyond.

#19

Of course everyone supports the new products: US-bits; EU-bits; CN-bits; etc. But maybe we removed those videos too fast didn’t we? :slight_smile:

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#20

1 comment:

Why do we care? They will print money and artificially inflate their “coin” value. Banks shouldnt be taught how to blockchain