Time as Units (proposal)

I propose the idiom: time as units.

The use of certain words to measure time could be convenient for measuring amounts of grin. It follows nicely that one second of time is roughly equal to the measure of time for one grin to be produced. Therefore, one grin could also be known as one grin-second or simply one second of grin. Further, one minute of grin is 60 grin seconds. Fractions of a single grin idiomatically follow the same measurements of time: milliseconds, nanoseconds.

My 2 seconds.

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Also see

https://forum.grin.mw/t/wtb-one-hour-in-atomic-swap-for-1-8-btc

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They already used grin in this 2011 movie

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Makes sense.

Time is money but no amount of money can buy time.

I’m totally for this. I prefer thinking of it as a time unit. I also think that by having people see seconds it might make it more obvious that you can’t just change the monetary policy because everyone knows how time works. I do think it might take some time for people to get used to because buying a second of grin might sounds less than 1$.

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Time is an illusion. Within the light-cone, all points are time-like separated, meaning that given the right speed of your frame of reference, everything can happen in the same place, just at different times. This means that the order of events is actually arbitrary in Minkowski space-time.

Time is an illusion. Money even more so.

One can see this in a very direct way now, since the time to mine 1 grin has changed in the last year and will absolutely change in the next two years.

A lot of hippie communities in the US in the 60s and 70s tried to make a local currency, and it was often built around an idea of a wage for an hour’s work. They all failed miserably. Money is actually equivalent to energy. It should be measured in joules.

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Here’s a break down of fractional units:

Unit Shorthand Amount
decisecond ds 0.1
centisecond cs 0.01
millisecond ms 0.001
microsecond µs 0.0001
etc…

Taken from:

Money represents a token of energy expenditure, whether from physical labor, extraction efforts, or whatever. The question is, why would a society invest the energy to establish a monetary system versus just freely eating the food scattered around their village? The answer - money is a fence. Money exists just to keep certain people in the village from getting what they need to survive because they don’t have the “points” to access it. If you want to tell a mother that she has to watch her son die, you need a scoring system (i.e. money) to point to in order to rationalize why she can’t access the food she needs for her son. In other words, societies expend effort and cost to make money so that they can build fences, hierarchies and inequeties. Money can not be made efficient or logical, because there is no logical reason why, given two nearly identitcal people in a village, that one should starve while the other laughs about it, watching.

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A digression, but interesting.

If one asks why impose fences, hierarchies and inequities, we can see it as a solution to a problem. Now with the problem in mind, we can find an alternative solution or optimize the current solution in some way. Point is: see it as a solution to a problem and focus on the problem, rather than the side-effects, the problems, that the current solution has.

The concept of money being valued as an energy expenditure should give credence to PoW projects such as Grin, more so than centralized projects like XRP or ERC20 tokens that didn’t involve mining.

Grin denominated and evenly fractionalized as units of time is already a perfect fit and this pairing will remain a constant (no halvenings). Maybe this will catch on. That will be 22 seconds of ツ please. Make it 20 seconds and you have a deal!

Officially applying time-aspect onto Grin is a great opportunity to make apparent the limitation around emissions. It is unfortunate that some (possibly most) view Grin’s inflation schedule as unlimited without questioning their perceptions on Ethereum’s inflation schedule. Viewing Grin’s inflation schedule as something bound to time may beautifully illustrate the limited nature of emissions.

I believe perceptions are very important to the long-term success of Grin. There have been many great ideas in the past, that weren’t appreciated nor valued enough to survive due to human perception. Sometimes these great ideas arrive again at a later time with greater resonance humanity. Let’s make sure Grin arrives. :wink:

Darn I was kinda hoping we’d go with the last names of Major League Baseball players from the early 90’s.

0.1 - Piazza
0.01 - Sosa
0.001 - Jackson (or a Bo)
0.0001 - McGuire
0.00001 - Griffey
0.000001 - Henderson

etc…

TBH I like the time idea.

Thinking about this again. As of right now at 7 cents per grin…

Time         Grin            USD          Example item
1 second             1             .07     nothing 
1 minute            60            4.20     dozen eggs
1 hour           3,600          252.00     CPU
1 day           86,400        6,048.00     10 year old sedan
1 week         604,800       42,336.00     new sports car
1 month      2,628,001      183,960.07     3 bedroom house in Ohio
1 year      31,535,975    2,207,518.25     3 bedroom house in Los Angeles

Given how many Grin there are in circulation, I’m glad that we likely would never need confusing terms for decimal places.

It would be cool to add this to a grin website lol. Kind of a silly little app, but it could look up the price of grin, and then compute how much USD each timeframe is, then grab the most popular item in the range of that price from Amazon or something haha

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At the bottom of this page, its there, you could ask the owner (if anyone knows the owner, can you tag privately or publicly) to add an example column or USD column for which he can use the Grin price API.

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Wow that’s perfect! Such an API might be more trouble than it’s worth idk. But it’s cool to be able to think of the price in terms of real world objects rather than USD

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When Grin is at $10, we introduce the millisecond. Pretty clean!

Time             Grin      USD      Example item
1 millisecond     .001      .01     nothing
1 second         1.000    10.00     12 pack of beer
1 minute        60.000   600.00     nice TV

When Grin is at $10,000 we introduce the microsecond.

Time             Grin             USD           Example item
1 microsecond     .000001                .01    
1 millisecond     .001                 10.00     
1 second         1.000            100,000.00     
1 minute        60.000        360,000,000.00     

When Grin is at $10,000,000 we introduce the nanosecond.

Time             Grin             USD           Example item
1 nanosecond      .000000001             .01    
1 microsecond     .000001              10.00   
1 millisecond     .001             10,000.00     
1 second         1.000         10,000,000.00     
1 minute        60.000        600,000,000.00     

I guess the idea is to only introduce terms as they are really needed

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It’s already here.
Let’s take real use-case without talking about the price: micropayments.
They are needed for mining pool, ideally it should be decentralized p2p mining pool. Everybody can mine GRIN from phone, but hashrate is not so big, so we can wait for payout for months or later years… not good. With micropayments everybody has a chance to get rewards much faster.
And spend it to buy some food at shop :wink:

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It’s highly likely major of cryptos fail….

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True! I guess I am just thinking about it from a “non technical” perspective.

You don’t hear regular non-techy people talking about cents, let alone fractions of cents.

Burgers and eggs aren’t micro-payments, etc.

But you’re right that there is a place for these terms! I just wouldn’t expect my Dad to use “milli” until it becomes the equivalent of one cent basically.

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Cause she is using Windows :stuck_out_tongue:
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