the lexiconomy is the world’s first decentralized and economized dictionary, empowering anyone to coin a word or phrase. it’s a dictionary for all languages, people, and cultures.
language is never static. every day new words and phrases are invented while the meanings of old ones transform. as language evolves, the lexiconomy will serve as a persistent, immutable, and censorship-resistant record of the world’s language. over time, it will capture the evolution of the human language.
the lexiconomy inherits its unique, unchanging, and uncensorable properties from the ethereum blockchain. the lifespan of the lexiconomy is limited only by the life of ethereum. as a decentralized platform, the scope of the lexiconomy goes far beyond a web application. the permanency of the lexiconomy allows it to be a base language layer, or language api, for future decentralized applications to build upon.
every entry in the lexiconomy is a called a lemma. a lemma can be a single letter, a long phrase, or a mathematical equation. the relationship between lemmas is recursive, one lemma can be composed of many smaller lemmas!
lemma ownership is in perpetuity and extends beyond the lexiconomy. owners can freely sell, trade, and use their lemmas in any erc 721-compatible application. within the lexiconomy, owners are rewarded for their ingenuity and lexical contributions. every time lemmas are used to compose a new lemma, the owners of the used lemmas are compensated.
the possibilities of the lexiconomy are only bounded by language. as language is created, defined, and controlled by people, the lexiconomy will also be defined and controlled by the imagination of people all over the world.
The Big Blockchain Lie
Now that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have plummeted from last year’s absurdly high valuations, the techno-utopian mystique of so-called distributed-ledger technologies should be next. The promise to cure the world’s ills through “decentralization” was just a ruse to separate retail investors from their hard-earned real money.
A similar pattern has emerged in cryptocurrency trading. Fully 99% of all transactions occur on centralized exchanges that are hacked on a regular basis. And, unlike with real money, once your crypto wealth is hacked, it is gone forever.
.. Moreover, the centralization of crypto development – for example, fundamentalists have named Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin a “benevolent dictator for life” – already has given lie to the claim that “code is law,” as if the software underpinning blockchain applications is immutable. The truth is that the developers have absolute power to act as judge and jury. When something goes wrong in one of their buggy “smart” pseudo-contracts and massive hacking occurs, they simply change the code and “fork” a failing coin into another one by arbitrary fiat, revealing the entire “trustless” enterprise to have been untrustworthy from the start.2
.. Lastly, wealth in the crypto universe is even more concentrated than it is in North Korea. Whereas a Gini coefficient of 1.0 means that a single person controls 100% of a country’s income/wealth, North Korea scores 0.86, the rather unequal United States scores 0.41, and Bitcoin scores an astonishing 0.88.2
As should be clear, the claim of “decentralization” is a myth propagated by the pseudo-billionaires who control this pseudo-industry. Now that the retail investors who were suckered into the crypto market have all lost their shirts, the snake-oil salesmen who remain are sitting on piles of fake wealth that will immediately disappear if they try to liquidate their “assets.”
.. Moreover, in cases where distributed-ledger technologies – so-called enterprise DLT – are actually being used, they have nothing to do with blockchain. They are private, centralized, and recorded on just a few controlled ledgers. They require permission for access, which is granted to qualified individuals. And, perhaps most important, they are based on trusted authorities that have established their credibility over time. All of which is to say, these are “blockchains” in name only.3
Stephen Bannon Buys Into Bitcoin
“It almost seems like a natural progression for a man who gained prominence by shoveling out unfounded conspiracies to now shilling complex technology and financial instruments to an unsophisticated investing public,”
.. Bitcoin has been popular with the alt-right and nationalist communities because it has provided them with a way to receive online donations and evade restrictions put on them by banks and payment companies. PayPal and Apple Pay, for example, shut down the accounts of some right-wing groups last year.
.. Cryptocurrencies are also gaining mainstream interest. Goldman Sachs, where Mr. Bannon worked in the 1980s, recently said it was creating a Bitcoin trading operation. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been looking at building an exchange for digital tokens. And Facebook has put top executives on a project exploring use of the technology.
.. Mr. Bannon is particularly interested in the possibility that countries could create coins tied to national wealth — an Italian coin tied to marble deposits in the country, for instance.
.. The company, Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE, brought on Mr. Bannon as vice chairman in 2005 to help Mr. Pierce expand the business and deal with legal threats.
.. Mr. Bannon credits the company with introducing him to the ranks of disaffected young men who gathered online around video games, and who became pillars of the alt-right movement.
Why Reinvent the Monetary Wheel?
Cryptocurrencies promise to realize Friedrich Hayek’s dream of a free market in money. But human societies have discovered no better way to keep the value of money roughly constant than by relying on central banks to exercise control over its issue.
.. Underlying this recurrence is the instinctive feeling that economic calamities must have monetary causes, and therefore monetary remedies... If monetary fluctuations are the main cause of economic fluctuations, and if one can ensure the right quantity of money to support normal business activity, there will be no need for government interference. This has been the main teaching of economists wedded to free markets... Few remember that quantitative easing (QE) marked the start of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. With the US on the gold standard, the Treasury purchased gold to lift its price and thus augment the buying power of heavily indebted farmers. FDR’s gold-buying spree, described at the time by John Maynard Keynes as “the gold standard on the booze,” has been generally dismissed as ineffective... In other words, there is no elasticity in the currency. This means that long before the mine is exhausted, the currency will run into the same problem as the gold standard: not providing enough money to support a growing economy and population. This would be exacerbated by any tendency to hoard bitcoins... At the same time, cryptocurrencies provide no security against inflation. Hayek thought that a competitive currency system would eventually lead to a monopoly of the one that kept its value best. But we have, of course, been through exactly this process of weeding out inflationary currencies throughout history, and we ended up with central banks. It is amazing that anyone should consider it necessary to retrace these steps, only to end up in the same place... The Hayekian diagnosis of the last crisis – excessive creation of credit by the banks – is correct as far as it goes. But one has only to ask why this happened to understand that there are no mechanical answers to the question or solutions to the problem. It’s not quite true to say, “Look after the economy and money will look after itself.” But it is nearer the truth than the belief that monetary reform on its own will cure the problems of a sick economy.
.. Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defense of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history.
In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet. But it has also become the byword for a libertarian ideology that treats all governments, central banks, traditional financial institutions, and real-world currencies as evil concentrations of power that must be destroyed. Blockchain fundamentalists’ ideal world is one in which all economic activity and human interactions are subject to anarchist or libertarian decentralization. They would like the entirety of social and political life to end up on public ledgers that are supposedly “permissionless” (accessible to everyone) and “trustless” (not reliant on a credible intermediary such as a bank).
.. Yet far from ushering in a utopia, blockchain has given rise to a familiar form of economic hell. A few self-serving white men (there are hardly any women or minorities in the blockchain universe) pretending to be messiahs for the world’s impoverished, marginalized, and unbanked masses claim to have created billions of dollars of wealth out of nothing. But one need only consider the massive centralization of power among cryptocurrency “miners,” exchanges, developers, and wealth holders to see that blockchain is not about decentralization and democracy; it is about greed.2
For example, a small group of companies – mostly located in such bastions of democracy as Russia, Georgia, and China – control between two-thirds and three-quarters of all crypto-mining activity, and all routinely jack up transaction costs to increase their fat profit margins. Apparently, blockchain fanatics would have us put our faith in an anonymous cartel subject to no rule of law, rather than trust central banks and regulated financial intermediaries.