RE: Ontario Minimum Wage Hike Is Costing Us Money (Freedom Minute)
There are already commodity coins in play developed by Provenance which track for over 200 retailers and producers. These track commodities from the field/manufacturer to the retail shelf. When a person buys an item with BTC ... they receive a coin which represent the ownership of the specific commodity. It doesn't defeat the medium of exchange, it facilitates the trail of ownership.
Cryptocurrencies are just a tool which are meant to decentralize our societies. It changes the way that we can relate to banks. This pushes them back by decades to where they need to encourage people to loan money to them (so they can finance loans, mortgages etc.) instead of charging us to hold our money. They represent an opportunity to disrupt governments by giving us a mechanism to fund government budgets directly instead of having a couple hundred people deciding for us. The only thing preventing people from directly funding Education vs Healthcare vs Military vs Infrastructure spending instead of having governments voting on budgets is the necessary will of the people. Another thing is that if I elected to spend a government token on education and healthcare but not military, I could follow the transactions that token was used for on the blockchain. I could see if the token was used to fund areas that I did not agree with.
Any altcoin that is meant to be a "commodity coin" only has value based on speculation, and is bound to drop to 0. You think any dispensaries accept hempcoin? No, but investors do because BTC is valuable and cannabis is valuable, so naturally you can combine the two and scam your way to the top.
Cryptocurrency is meant to act as money, or as a way to use decentralized computing power to solve scientific applications, or a number of other things. There is no need to have a special medium of exchange for each commodity.
Currently commodities appear on exchanges such as the CMEGroup
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/
They have an important function to help farmers hedge for future price variations. A commodity based altcoin would aid/disrupt this process. For instance there is 300 times more gold offered in paper transactions then currently exist on the planet. A gold_coin would allow linking to a specific asset ... and would help to force speculators out of the market. Currently the medium of exchange is USD. Having BTC as the medium of exchange paired with "gold_coin" would also prevent a Central Bank (Switzerland, USA, UK, etc.) from manipulating the price of a commodity by printing currency to buy it. Contrast these two charts:
STEEM/BTC
STEEM/USD
In comparison to BTC, STEEM has become very stable while against the USD it has become very volatile. Is this volatility because of STEEM or because of the USD?
But don't you see? You don't push the speculators out of the market—you only push them to speculating the commodity coin price instead of/as well as the commodity price. Which they, as well as vendors, would more than likely say fuck the commodity coin and use the regular medium instead.
No commodity coin is needed to help farmers hedge against price fluctuations... Futures already do that.
Of course the USA does things differently but let me tell you about Canada. In Canada we have agricultural industries just as in the US. Our hog and beef Industries are similar to the US industry as its price is set by the futures market. We also have two industries milk and chickens which rely on a supply management system.
Just speaking about beef vs dairy, they have similar cost structures (you need land, barns and cattle). When I was young, beef producers were very flash. Each year they would buy expensive cars, swimming pools etc because they would receive a huge paycheck when they sold their steers. In contrast dairy farmers would receive a "paycheck" every month based on their production. Farmers were able to sell a set level of milk at a certain price (because of a quota they had). If they did not meet their quota, they didn't get paid. If they produced more than their quota they got paid a second rate ... which was priced at the international milk price. The rate for the quota priced was fairly determined to cover the costs and a reasonable amount of profits. Unlike the beef industry which might have huge profits some years and huge losses other years, dairy farmers were guaranteed a set price.
The problem with a supply management system from the viewpoint of a consumer was that it is a form of monopoly pricing which causes the price of milk to be slightly higher than the USA (because the farmers are being paid fairly). What this means is that the average herd size is 85 in Canada while in the USA the average herd size is 223. In other words US farmers have to milk over two and a half times the number of cows to achieve the same standard of living as Canadian farmers.
With beef farmers, because the prices fluctuate so dramatically both the man and the woman tend to have jobs (factory workers, teachers) outside of the farm. In other words they tend to supplement their farm incomes from other sources.
My point is that having a futures market is one solution but other solutions can be better.
As far as arguing about this speculators etc I am reminded of people who ask "where does the money come from". This link describes how fish are processed via a coin:
https://www.provenance.org/tracking-tuna-on-the-blockchain
Here is an image describing the process:
I am not talking about what could be, I am talking about something actually happening now ... it is just the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet.
Price fixing affects the whole economy. Beef farmers in the US have to produce more because there is a greater demand, but the demand side benefits because they can buy the milk at a lower price. Price fixing also prevents farmers from exploring alternatives and expanding into new markets. The market price is the fair price. Canadian farmers may get "fair pay" for their milk, but they don't end up selling nearly as much. The economy as a whole pays the price, from the farmers to the fishermen. And deferring costs can often lead to prohibitive logistical issues and debt.
Price fixing is downright criminal collusion. Also, commodity coins may be in use currently—but once people realize they don't service an actual purpose (apart from complicating ledgers), they will be abandoned. Speculation is keeping them afloat.