[HN Gopher] A $100k Prize for a Decentralized Inflation Dashboard
___________________________________________________________________
A $100k Prize for a Decentralized Inflation Dashboard
Author : exolymph
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-08-05 21:29 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (1729.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (1729.com)
| BenoitP wrote:
| What I'd really like to see is a multi-dimensional inflation
| vector that would also be future-proof.
|
| People really need diverse items: they need food, but also real
| estate, the prices of which are going through the roof currently,
| and that's a form of inflation. Also, there are many profiles of
| consumption. People have different needs.
|
| I'd say that it could be a 100 floating point vector; with the
| first 40 values arranged by increasing importance on Maslow's
| pyramid of human needs; 20 for consumption pattern diversity; and
| 40 for future consumption needs, initially set to 0, to be added
| at the rate of 1 every 5 years.
| gruez wrote:
| >Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have
| different needs.
|
| How do you get people to agree on which profile? I have a
| feeling it'll end up like the various unemployment statistics
| U-1 through U-6, ie. "you're a fool if you believe unemployment
| is at x% (U-3), the _real_ unemployment rate is y% (your choice
| of U1 /2/4/5/6, depending on the picture you want to paint)"
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >If enough of the right people believe that inflation is going to
| happen, it will. As such, when inflation is happening, there is
| often a push to censor discussion of inflation itself, under the
| grounds that discussing the problem actually causes it in the
| first place.
|
| The flip side to this notion is that if someone stands to profit
| from inflation, they're incentivized to promote discussion of
| inflation with the hope of increasing it. Would anyone in the
| blockchain space stand to profit from the US dollar's demise?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Yeah I'd have to set some actual evidence of censorship, rather
| then just asserting it. Unless by censorship they really mean
| people arguing against them. There seems to be a thing now in
| some circles where any disagreement is considered censorship.
| [deleted]
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, a function of money
| printing_
|
| Is it, though? Are hotels and used cars more expensive this year
| because of money printing?
| _jsdw wrote:
| Indeed! If somebody was able to print a trillion dollars and
| stash it away in their bank account, I don't see why any
| observable inflation would occur.
| wmf wrote:
| "Inflation is a monetary phenomenon" is a quote from economist
| Milton Friedman but most economists disagree.
| anythingdude321 wrote:
| this is a reference to a famous Milton Friedman quote
| "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" --
| of course this is a tautology, but he didn't mean the trivial
| version when he said it, but rather he was making an empirical
| claim.
|
| in this piece it looks like the author is making the
| tautological version of the claim, by following up and
| describing it as "a function of money printing" -- which is
| obviously true it is a function of money printing and several
| other things
| almost_usual wrote:
| It only is when the money printed is mailed to millions of
| people.
|
| A decade ago the money printing was to build back bank cash
| reserves so there wasn't inflation.
| wrs wrote:
| OK, blockchain fans, I'm genuinely confused as usual... Can
| someone explain what the point is of collecting price data and
| then putting it on the chain with a smart contract to do
| calculations on it? If "censorship" is a problem, why not just
| broadcast/mirror the signed data? If the calculation is
| untrusted, why not just publish the source code and let people
| run it on the published data? What is the blockchain
| accomplishing here?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| For about the same reason that you should use blockchain for
| inventory management.
| gruez wrote:
| Probably so it can tie in with some smart contract that's based
| off the CPI (eg. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities). As
| for why that's useful, I'm not sure. At the end you'll still
| need a trusted oracle for the scraped prices.
| bko wrote:
| It would be very useful for on-chain financial derivatives
| based off a more accurate inflation gauge. I don't trust the
| official CPI numbers and don't see them as accurately
| reflecting my cost of living increases over the years. Couple
| in the fact that there are literally trillions in pension
| benefits tied to CPI, so the incentive to manipulate these
| numbers is huge. It's already very opaque. If you look at the
| constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up
| around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat
| for the last ten years.
|
| The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources
| and some averaging would take place.
|
| [0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/0
| 7/1...
| lend000 wrote:
| The CPI basically measures the median American's budget. So
| if wealth inequality is unchanging, then it's a decent
| measure of economy-wide inflation. Otherwise, it measures
| inflation x delta wealth inequality.
| lottin wrote:
| These are people who think the government wants to censor their
| prices database... so not exactly geniuses.
| anythingdude321 wrote:
| Including the computation and data on-chain enables other
| parties to use it trustlessly and verifiably. If you, for
| example, wanted to make an algorithmic central bank that
| reacted to inflation numbers you would need on-chain CPI in
| order to do that. Similarly you may want to index your interest
| rate to the CPI in some way (like LIBOR). It becomes a lot more
| useful when on-chain than in a central database
| MaysonL wrote:
| Mining fees?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| If all you have is a hammer...
| Cantinflas wrote:
| I think you are right, this can be done without a blockchain.
|
| Once done, it could be useful to make an oracle with it and put
| it on ethereum so it can be used by other smart contracts. But
| not the calculation itself nor the original data points
| echelon wrote:
| This was neat until it asked you to put the data on the
| blockchain. Might as well be asking to distribute the network
| packets over pigeons. What a totally orthogonal, shoehorned
| objective.
| IshKebab wrote:
| "How can we promote our crypto pyramid scheme?"
| wmf wrote:
| A CPI oracle on the blockchain would be nice to have (e.g. you
| could (try to) peg to CPI) but it does seem orthogonal from the
| data gathering and calculation part.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| not a bad idea, but the way to do it is probably to come up with
| a certain basket and then actually have people physically go into
| stores and record prices in those stores and then reward them
| with a crypto token for contributing ( kinda like the mystery
| shopper industry ).
| gruez wrote:
| What's preventing people from making up the prices?
| paulgb wrote:
| This becomes especially important if these oracles become
| used in smart contracts. As we learned from LIBOR, even the
| traditional finance industry can't resist the urge to nudge a
| benchmark in their preferred direction. At least in that
| case, the parties were not anonymous.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| you can have them submit it by taking a photo of the price,
| or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they check
| out. you can run sanity checks to clean the data, for
| example, if someone says eggs cost 50 bucks, throw away their
| submission, etc.
| gruez wrote:
| >or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they
| check out.
|
| Sounds like it'll be cheaper to buy the data off one of
| those receipt scanning apps. Better reach, and you don't
| need to make your own data acquisition/validation pipeline.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| well, the beauty of paying with crypto token is you pay
| with the token you yourself minted out of nothing, so
| initially it costs nothing to use it to pay people and
| then if enough people make enough submissions to this
| dashboard and you design token to be useful in some kind
| of defi like thing, it will go to the moon for the same
| reason they all do.
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| $100k seems laughably low, when you consider that it buys less
| than 4 months of dev time (assuming a $200/hr consulting rate).
| paulgb wrote:
| It does seem low compared to the rise in developer salaries of
| late. I guess that's why they need help tracking inflation.
| usmannk wrote:
| Technically it says "We'll invest $100k in the best entrant if
| you end up starting a company". I guess not bad if you're
| already working on this?
| gruez wrote:
| >if you end up starting a company
|
| How can you monetize this? The whole point is that the data
| is public for everyone to see?
| thrill wrote:
| People can pay you to explain it. People can pay you to
| extend it. People can pay you to do something different
| because you showed how smart you are.
| sparkling wrote:
| Just to throw a few ideas in the room:
|
| * offer integrations into various relevant systems
|
| * ability to build custom baskets and/or change the
| weighting of different categories
| gruez wrote:
| >* offer integrations into various relevant systems
|
| What's your moat here? What's preventing a competitor
| from using the blockchain data you published to make
| their own product?
|
| >* ability to build custom baskets and/or change the
| weighting of different categories
|
| Considering that the data is public, that seems easy to
| do. See also: above comment about moats.
| sparkling wrote:
| If it has a good enough UI, people will pay, just like
| anything else. Not everybody wants to build their own
| scripts around the data, even if its free.
|
| Obviously this is not a billion dollar idea, but it sure
| could bring in some $ to pay for a full-time developer or
| two and still make a little profit.
| gruez wrote:
| > If it has a good enough UI, people will pay, just like
| anything else. Not everybody wants to build their own
| scripts around the data, even if its free.
|
| Then a big corp comes up with their own offering and
| steamrolls you with their lower prices, integration with
| their existing products, and better engineering/sales
| staff. See for instance, mongodb and elasticsearch.
| kevmo wrote:
| 1. What is the point of the blockchain here?
|
| 2. This seems worth way more than 100k & they just want multiple
| teams working on it (competing), so they can then invest 100k in
| a company? This seems incredibly underfunded.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Does something already exist that allows person from country A to
| find out in which country B their home currency goes the
| furthest? Sort of a combination of bundle of goods and exchange
| rate? I've thought it something that could be plugged into a
| charity finder.
| sparkling wrote:
| A USD-denominated cost of living database? Plenty of sites out
| there doing that.
| killion wrote:
| I distrust any website who prevents me from using the back button
| to leave their site.
|
| Browsers should prevent pushing to history if I haven't clicked.
| geoah wrote:
| I think it's a bug with the way they've embedded the google
| form, it seems do something weird with the window controls here
| (firefox, macos)
| tehjoker wrote:
| Inflation can be good. It causes the value of debts to decrease.
| However, sharp inflation in consumer prices without corresponding
| wage increases can precipitate a humanitarian crisis.
| javert wrote:
| Since inflation can cause the value of debts to decrease, it's
| more expensive to borrow money.
|
| All monetary distortion (including inflation) translates into
| economic distortion (suboptimal allocation and waste).
| qeternity wrote:
| Inflation is neither good nor bad. It is merely a measure.
|
| People mistake cause and effect in economics all the time.
| Inflation _can_ be a good proxy for money velocity. But it can
| also just be a proxy for growth of money supply. In the former,
| it's often a sign of economic activity /growth. In the latter,
| it's often a sign of stagflation.
|
| The US seems closer to stagflation at the moment. The Fed have
| an opportunity to nip this in the bud and deflate their balance
| sheet, but they won't.
| almost_usual wrote:
| This feels like a blockchain rube goldberg machine.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-05 23:01 UTC)