Interesting idea. Quite likely, currency is a way to quantify value. In any system with limited resources there is a question of how to distributed the limited resources.
(Even AI will have limited resources because it must physically exist somewhere).
These resources are things like computations, memory storage, bandwidth. Value could be distributed around the system with a currency.
Currencies could be more abstract things than crypto though. Could also include energy or some kind of political/social power (votes).
In nature, energy is a way to quantify value. It is traded, stored, exchanged. Organisms with more energy can exert more influence over their environment. (Eg tree vs bacteria).
By control of their environment I mean they could physically change more of the world around them. Eg a tree reorganizes tons of CO2 into it’s structure
but bacterium will only reorganize picograms of material over its lifetime
I was thinking more one tree and one bacterium. You’re right though, in extreme cases very little matter can control a larger system.
& commonly populations of smaller individuals control/overtake/take down a larger individual.
True, cash allows for an individual to have an effect greater than their 1-for-1 vote (eg billionaires throwing around money).
& thinking about money as energy, rich people can use money to expend more energy to change the world around them/their environment (eg building skyscrapers)
than poor people (eg being stuck where they are or not being able to physically change their environment).
Where the abstraction falls apart with respect to politics is, like you say, the “currency” of the system is a mix of cash and power.
So I was trying to consider extremes to separate the two.
I was thinking more along the lines of a system that prohibited money as a way to allocate limited resources. They (AIs or humans) would still need some way to distribute.
This could be done with voting (guess a human example would be a commune?) In such a system there isn’t money but people still have political/social power
eg maybe one person is a leader or only elders vote or agents vote for others who are related to them or agents form parties to vote for each other’s interests
Aren’t there cryptocurrencies with varied governance schemes? Are there any like this that eschew money in favor of vote?
Also, Vidtek, what prompted this question?
I also had in mind an energy rate density. Where more energy flowing through a smaller mass are measured as “more complex” not sure how this fits in, just thinking about it.
