Someone, not Balaji, forwarded this to me.
the world needs a global, decentralized, censorship-resistant inflation dashboard. For the next 90 days, we’re accepting submissions for this project. We’ll invest $100k in the best entrant
…what we want to build is a maximally government-independent, on-chain, open-source, crypto oracle version of MIT’s Billion Prices Project, which uses raw data from many different online merchants to provide a public, transparent, reproducible, and internationally useful calculation of how much inflation is happening.
In addition,
The ultimate version of the smart contract would allow you to pick some weighted basket of goods to get a personal inflation calculator
Thirty-five years ago, there was a mini-scandal when it was discovered that the Pentagon was paying $600 for a toilet seat. When consultants looked into it, they discovered that the military procurement process kept adding requirements to proposals until they became ridiculously expensive to fulfill. I was reminded of that when I saw Balaji’s requirements document. In my email back to the individual who had forwarded it to me, I wrote:
I would say that by the time you could execute this, $100,000 would have been eroded by inflation to almost nothing. š
Seriously, it’s way too hard as described. Anyone who submits a proposal shows me that they are too delusional to be trusted with an investment.
If the problem is governments hiding inflation, then I would aim for a simpler solution. Come up with a list of about 20 broad categories, such as durable consumer goods, medical services, housing, transportation, etc. Then for each category come up with a list of about 10 items that are typical within the category, which together track broader price indexes in that category, and for which price data are obtainable in many locations. Think about items that would be hard for the government to manipulate–for example it is unwise to choose a type of bread that a government subsidizes. So now you have 200 items for which you need to collect data.
I think that a lot of the requirements go way beyond trying to get a decent measure of inflation, e.g. enabling the calculation of an individualized inflation estimate. If it were me calling for proposals, I would focus the requirements on obtaining a hard-to-game inflation measure and get rid of all the other crazy requirements. This looks like something a team of government bureaucrats would dream up, and no genuine entrepreneur should go near it.
US military acquisition is no doubt a travesty and could be improved in countless ways.
But, as I understand it, the old “600 dollar hammer”, or toilet seat in this case, is nothing more than an accounting device. At least, as it has been explained to me. The “weapon system” contains thousands of line items, costly or negligible, but you can’t purchase them separately. So you end up with the $600 hammer by dividing the total cost by the total number of line items.
Can anyone justify the existence of OER to me?
Surely, owner occupied theoretical rent and actual rent should be correlated enough to just use actual rents.
Or alternatively, you could just ask what the cost of carry on such properties are in the current environment (30 year mortgage at current prices + taxes + maintenance).
This whole backward looking survey method just seems like the most retarded way to do it, unless you are trying to hide something.
Isnāt there some real utility to having this on chain in a censorship resistant form? I know it increases the complexity, but also the value. With all of the various online marketplaces, gathering thousands of prices Degus may be much easier than imagined. (Maybe not much more valuable than hundreds of prices until you get to the āpersonalizedā inflation measure concept.)
This contest has been up on 1729.com for a couple months. The reward is potentially $200,000. 100k investment plus 100k grant. It gives coinmarketcap.com as an analogy since that site tracks prices for 10,000+ digital assets. The page also provides a list of issues and ideas on dealing with those issues.
I agree with Null Hypothesis that this is useful and that online marketplaces reduce the difficulty. Inflation is extremely uneven. I would expect that the inflation rate could easily be double for one neighbor versus another due to the product mix they purchase.