Is trade ever fully causal? Ordinary trade can be modeled as acausal trade with the “no communication” condition relaxed. Even in a scenario as seemingly causal as using a vending machine, trade only occurs if the buyer believes that the vending machine will actually dispense its goods and not just take the buyer’s money. Similarly, the vending machine owner’s decision to set up the machine was informed by predictions about whether or not people would buy from it. The only kind of trade that seems like it might be fully causal is a self-executing contract that’s tied to an external trigger, and for which both parties have seen the source code and verified that the other party have enough resources to make the agreed-upon trade. Would a contract like that still have some acausal element anyway?
Physical causality is naturally occuring acausal dependence (between physically interacting things), similarly to how a physical calculator captures something about abstract arithmetic. So the word “acausal” is unfortunate, it’s a more general thing that shouldn’t be defined by exclusion of the less general special case of immense practical importance, acausal dependence is something like logical/computational causality. And acausal trade is trade that happens in situations within the fabric of acausal dependencies, how an agent existing within acausal ontology might think about regular trade. But since a clearer formulation remains elusive, fixing the terminology seems premature.
Is trade ever fully causal? Ordinary trade can be modeled as acausal trade with the “no communication” condition relaxed. Even in a scenario as seemingly causal as using a vending machine, trade only occurs if the buyer believes that the vending machine will actually dispense its goods and not just take the buyer’s money. Similarly, the vending machine owner’s decision to set up the machine was informed by predictions about whether or not people would buy from it. The only kind of trade that seems like it might be fully causal is a self-executing contract that’s tied to an external trigger, and for which both parties have seen the source code and verified that the other party have enough resources to make the agreed-upon trade. Would a contract like that still have some acausal element anyway?
Physical causality is naturally occuring acausal dependence (between physically interacting things), similarly to how a physical calculator captures something about abstract arithmetic. So the word “acausal” is unfortunate, it’s a more general thing that shouldn’t be defined by exclusion of the less general special case of immense practical importance, acausal dependence is something like logical/computational causality. And acausal trade is trade that happens in situations within the fabric of acausal dependencies, how an agent existing within acausal ontology might think about regular trade. But since a clearer formulation remains elusive, fixing the terminology seems premature.