Most countries of the world emit their own currency, but not all of them. Ground into economic hopelessness by fraudulent money printing, jurisdictions like Zimbabwe, El Salvador, and Argentina have seen their currencies inflated into nothingness, like the Weimarian Deutschmark eventually required billions to pay the price of a loaf of bread and became more valuable as fuel by weight than wood or coal purchased with it. Such are the effects of allowing criminals to counterfeit money unrestrained by corrupt governments.
IMG source - Gagaru.club - MS13 is extant governance technology in action
Eventually countries either abandon such devalued currencies and replace them with new currencies (that will only perform the same absent reform of government policies, which requires reforming (or removing) the criminals that were stealing wealth by those means) or adopt currencies that their gang of irrepressible counterfeiters can't print into meaninglessness. USD, being the global reserve currency today, are often the go to currency for the hapless peoples that cannot conduct their affairs with their hopelessly inflationary countries' money. Black markets for critical commodities and services priced in USD arise, and Milei, Argentina's bombastic new President campaigned on making USD the official currency of Argentina, while Zimbabwe devised a new currency backed with gold, and El Salvador adopted BTC.
Like countries, platforms and blockchains mostly emit their own currency. Making money is where the profit is, after all. However, blockchains are perfectly able to account for transactions in currencies they don't emit. Blockchains are simply distributed ledgers, and emitting a currency isn't a requirement for accounting.
In my last post, I discussed the suitability of FOSS blockchains as means of governing, that because of the facility with which the code can be customized, could enable even personal blockchains to be adopted by sovereigns that can't manage to agree to govern themselves by rules anyone else has already adopted. This presupposes that such blockchain governance mechanisms are interoperable, using a common currency or having an innate exchange mechanism(s) that are usable to permit common operation, funding enterprises, paying obligations, making purchases, and etc. with other sovereign entities that have their own blockchains. While a blockchain with only one user is contradictory, since there is no distribution of the ledger across multiple users, interoperable networks can have copies of the ledgers/blockchains with which they interact and conduct commerce, creating that redundancy that provides accountability. Redundancy services could even become a commercial sector, with escrow of data rather than ducats for a fee. Freedom isn't free, eh?
While Steem, Hive, and Blurt all use different currencies, the reason for their existence is because of differences in economic policies on those platforms, and they could all use BTC instead, for example, and allow accounting differences internally that don't create new currency (eliminating the rewards pool). Blurt, for example, could use Hive tokens as it's currency but not allowing downvotes on it's platform, nor having the rewards pool to create inflation used to upvote content, but allowing folks to tip out of their personal wallets to upvote creators.
I am not particularly competent at accounting, or maths generally, needing to take off my shoes to count past ten, so am aware that I am certainly missing things that might impact the viability of my thesis regarding interoperability of blockchains using a common currency. Since I hate being wrong, and am incompetent to be right without receiving criticism, I would appreciate being informed of how this thesis fails in ways I have not considered.
I expect most folks on Hive would agree that taxation is theft, and that uncontrolled inflation is the product of counterfeiting, both of which are crimes commonly rendering currencies increasingly useless and causing governments allowing such crimes to achieve such unenviable fate themselves. There are tens of thousands of currencies today, depending on your definition of currency, and whether you count digital coupons created by retailers for marketing purposes, or postage stamps, or PM's and bullion, for example, all of which have been used, or can be, as currencies. Rather than greasing the economic skids internationally, that plethora of currencies is instead a sand on those skids, impeding commerce by complicating accounting.
Hive, Steem, and Blurt all have identical inflation (AFAIK. Having not actually looked I just assume that the other differences that caused the chains to differentiate didn't involve changing the emissions rate of their currencies), but other economic mechanisms have required their differentiation. I mention Blurt specifically because I strongly agree with the elimination of taxation that was the fundamental economic difference between it and Hive. Downvotes are taxes. Taxation is theft. Hive doesn't need such taxation, except as prevention of crime such as scams and plagiarism. These taxes have been applied punitively and to prevent growth of the platform that would attract Suns to shine on it and outcompete the current plutocracy, exactly as happened to Steem.
No functional government in the world would consider allowing wealthy stakeholders to tax their competition at their sole option, and Hive and Steem allowing such economic barbarism dooms them to their present fate of inutility and laughable user retention. Commercial spam is largely controlled through resource credits on Hive today, and criminal spam undertaken by whales that have slipped their chains can be deincentivized through a rational DV system restricted to criminal prosecution.
I bring this up because my last post is extraordinarily important. The world is in the grip of existential danger due to utterly archaic and criminally corrupt governance. It always has been, because governance mechanisms of modern technological competence have never been employed, and brute force hacking and slashing the guts out of people is the standard of sovereign governance in practice today. This barbarity literally reduces global economic viability to the level of street gangs.
Frankly, it is amazing that good people have managed to create functional societies at all in the world with governance technology so crude and incapable of enabling commerce and lawful co-existence.
I am convinced that modern technological standards of governance would make a world of difference today, enabling sovereign people to exercise rational management of their personal assets without depending on outrageously fraudulent scammers like the Fed, hopelessly corrupt representatives like Chuckie Shumer or Mitch McConnell, or the brute force and Machiavellian machinations that use it against us mercenary police forces are. Blurt was created to eliminate the whimsical taxation DV's afflicted Hive with, but has no IRL investment to back it's bespoke currency, making it incapable of relevance economically.
However, I think it simply created that currency because upvotes would have to come from personal wallets if it used Hive tokens, which do have financial value, and the loss of that 'free money' for upvotes wasn't acceptable to it's creators. I suspect the ability to upvote content - even out of personal wallets - with microtransactions is nominally useful, and a platform that rationally treated taxation (unlike Hive) that didn't try to create yet another currency to do so would have far greater success than Blurt, because of the many other modern technological advances the blockchain model Steem advented provide, such as microtransactions without fees, instant xfers without interference, red tape, and KYC surveillance, and so on.
It's the economy, stupid, remains fundamentally true about governance today, and Hive's failure to succeed demonstrates it's economic incompetence that is necessary to it's oligarchy to retain control of it's plutocracy. While I am incompetent to myself devise the specifics of a platform that rationally treats taxation while retaining the good tech advances Steem introduced to the world in 2016, I'd like to see them able to produce the benefits they are capable of unhampered by utterly ridiculous taxation policies/code and the personal greed and need of an oligarchy. I think we all would. That's why we're here, despite the obvious failures that Steem, Hive, and Blurt demonstrate.
We don't need plutocratic control of the code. @ned was right that oracles can enable 1a1v, and secure the code from grifters. Real governance is people, not tokens.
I think that if a fork could demonstrate nominal improvements to the code that ended the ridiculous tax censorship and secured the codebase against Suns (marauding plutocrats), we'd be able to disburse the modern governance technology FOSS blockchains avail to the sovereign peoples of the world. It's about goddamn time we had some modern governance on this rock, don't you think? Well, that's why I'm posting this, to gain the insight of your criticism. Maybe @theycallmedan was right in his rant about HBD, and maybe that is the currency chains can interoperate by. Dunno. I'm winging it here.
We clearly have technology that's able to benefit humanity, but stupidity is preventing us from benefiting it. I think that primarily is the DV taxation mechanism that enables an oligarchy to retain plutocratic power, and I'd like to see some experiments to prove me wrong attempted. What are the particulars such experiments should employ to fix Hive? It's clearly broken and isn't conquering the economic world in it's present form, which it's tech advances in governance should allow it to do.