Ergo: After Central Banks

[kushti]

During early days of Bitcoin there was popular to talk about “end the fed” in the community (which does mean “end central banks” globally). For early romantic period that was quite awesome, with time, however, I think, there is need to think deeply about the motto and corresponding questions, like, how this end would look like, and more importantly, what is the plan after that. Anyway, the spirit of early days is now mostly dead, unfortunately. But it provided ground for a lot of thought work behind creation and evolution of Ergo.

Even today Ergo can be seen as “after central banks” set of monetary and financial tooling, during to free nature of most of the tooling, p2p nature of many applications, contractual money to overcome crisis On Contractual Money

And I think it is worth to conceptualize Ergo movement around “after central banks” mindset.

• Why “after central banks” tooling is needed now ?

Current money systems are deeply unfair, and emitted money are simply not reaching many areas (mostly rural places), especially around economic downturns. For excluded areas and communities it would be beneficial to use the tooling right now.

Also, central banks are failing and sometimes disappearing all the time around the globe, including current moment (can be seen now in Lebanon, Yemen, sub-Saharan Africa etc).

• Does that mean working on destabilization of fiat ?

There is no need to spend efforts on destabilizing what is not stable, and it is better to focus on positive outcomes (ie building alternatives).

• How will central banks find this?

Ideally, they would welcome developments which are counter-cyclical to their work, they would be especially beneficial during times of crisis. We are not living in ideal world though.

[anon_real]

The nice thing about this whole thing is that in a long enough timeframe, it doesn’t matter whether central banks and governments welcome these ideas or not.

Either you adapt or you go extinct.

It doesn’t mean we should not welcome CBs and governments embracing new ideas, it just means that the train moves on and we should just keep building. The rest is just short-term noise.

[_qx]

Either you adapt or you go extinct.

100%, those in control of systems of benefit will hold tight to them until they suppress, fail, adapt, or a combination of those.

How do you two see greed based systems embracing or integrating systems like Ergo, which were designed to be fair? Incentives would point to duplicating and maintaining control, offering a “safer” alternative which remains in their enclave?

I think many people feel adoption comes from the top (even as simple as rich and prominent influencers). From your post here it’s even more clear to me that adoption occurs from the ground up. Fair systems will attract and thrive with those who depend on it once it is in their hands.

I’m glad Ergo is building for resilience.

[Grayman]

Banks centralise for a reason, as do insurance companies. There are many thousands of old farts with excess capital who want to lend it to many young bucks with an axe to grind.

Angel funding is when those folks meet p2p, but the easiest thing for a lender to do is earn interest on their bank deposits so they don’t need to evaluate loan prospects. And the easiest thing for a borrower to do is to just go to a bank and get a line of credit. If the banks compete with each other, that will drive down the spread between buying and lending, and business will flourish the old fashioned way.

We could set up craigslist for loans, like the good things dao. But current loans on the platform are all collateralized in order to prohibit fraud. If someone sets up shop offchain to evaluate loan prospects and make more interest by lending against trust, then that person will be a proto bank on ergo tooling.

So far Ergo, and other cryptocurrencies, are an attempt to make money more ergonomic. But most money in the real world is credit, not cash.

The central banks do not exist because they want to rip off the entire system via the Cantillon Effect; that is merely a happy accident. They exist because credit is a web of trust arrangements. A loan is a type of sale… and all sales are based on trust.