Gigs Shrugged

Two relevant articles.

The first is more about why the CPI is a lie, and has been for several years now:

Potential Future Hyperinflation

This one echoes my earlier sentiment:

What Nobody’s Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

On a Second Life related note:  The L$ actually hasn’t been getting more valuable, rather the USD has been getting weaker, and so has the L$.  Compare the L$ exchange rate with the USD exchange rate to any other currency.  “Keeping up with the dollar” is a losing proposition in this environment.

So our Fed is ostensibly basing their interest rate decisions on the CPI.  The CPI is a lie. It no longer tracks the actual increase in prices that we see every day when we go to buy the items we buy every day.

The government is printing money at a furious pace.  In 2000 the debt was 5.6 trillion.  With the bail-out bringing us to 11.3 trillion, we are more than double the debt in 8 years, and by extension, the money supply is heading for double too.  In our fiat system, debt is money.  The government has “printed” 6 trillion fresh US Dollars in the last 8 years, an amount roughly equal to the amount of US Dollars that existed in the entire world in 2000.

What’s the worst case scenario?  I think to answer that question one needs to look at the interest rates.  What will happen when the nominal rates are way lower than the effective rates of inflation?  The implication of this would be that one could actually profit by carrying debt that was issued at incorrectly low rates.  Because increased debt means increased supply of money, we have a system with positive, runaway, feedback.

Not being able to directly answer questions posed by players of the ARG was probably the most difficult part of running the Shanti ARG. I’m writing this so that I can document some of the thought and responses I have, before I forget them.

What is Shanti?

Well, if you haven’t heard by now, it was the development codename for what is now Meerkat, the OpenMetaverse Foundation viewer.

What was the point of the Shanti ARG?

I thought of it as a fun way to promote the Open Metaverse Foundation viewer, and also to help boost interest in SLCC itself, and my Open Source track. What it turned into was more, I think. The intimacy surprised me. People seemed to actually have strong reactions to the shanti game, at least, as strong as reactions can be over a web site.

Is Shanti just a ploy to get people to work together?

This question was an interesting one. At times I definitely wanted people to work together more. I felt like the early crypto challenges were being solved by a select few people. I wanted to come up with a challenge that encouraged a lot of people to participate.

This wasn’t only a ploy to get more traffic and exposure, though that was in the back of my mind. The result was the book cipher key that was spread out by IP address. Because you only got one part of the key based on what your IP address was, it ensured that at least 10-20 people needed to be actively involved in the solution.

Is Shanti just advertising for a shitty product?

Well, this question bothered me the most. Are these sort of things ever something other than advertising when you get down to it? Sure, it’s advertising, but it’s not really a product. Meerkat/Open Metaverse viewer is something new.

No one company or individual will own the open metaverse. I look forward to working with Linden Lab and the developer community we all work together to build it. One of the initial points of agreement that everyone had at the first meeting of the Architecture Working Group in San Francisco was that in order for the Second Life architecture to become a global standard, there must be multiple implementations.

Anyway it’s a long answer to say, “Yes, I think the hype is justified.” What we are building here is fundamentally different from what anyone has attempted to date. An independent, fully open source, community involved, metaverse viewer.