I think you just accidentally created conventional money again
Comment on Gonna be a great day!
TootSweet@lemmy.world 7 months ago
In my economics 101 gen ed course back in college, I remember a story about some society somewhere that used boulders as currency. But they were such a pain to lug around that often times they wouldn’t move them. They’d just keep track of who owned which boulders. “I’ll give you one boulder for a cow.” “Ok, it’s a deal.” “Cool, cool. The boulder over in so-and-so’s field is your now. Pleasure doing business with you.”
There was even a case where someone tried to transport a boulder across a lake but the boat sank midway and the boulder ended up on the lakebed under many feet of water. But they kept exchanging the boulder as currency for goods and services.
I’m imagining a dystopian Idiocracy-like future where Bitcoin has deleted itself, but people still trade seed phrases on slips of paper or pressed into metal plates with a “there’s 7 whole Bitcoins in this wallet. Trust me bro.”
Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 7 months ago
1024_Kibibytes@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I believe you’re referring to Rai stones:
Betch@lemmy.world 7 months ago
There was actually a crypto named after those called RaiBlocks but it’s called Nano now.
snooggums@kbin.social 7 months ago
Named after giant stonework, changed to a label that means very small. Hmmmm.
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
It’s very close to how fiat currency works IRL.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
How about a society that trades and exchanges goods and services for boulders … and an infinite number of imaginary boulders that don’t exist at all.
rynzcycle@kbin.social 7 months ago
You'd record the transfer by adding it to the rockchain?
ZagamTheVile@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Funny, I was thinking about the point where the Golgafrinchams on Earth adopted the leaf as currency and then burned down all the forests to control inflation.
ZagamTheVile@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That still makes more sense than crypto.
DanglingFury@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“This note is redeemable in boulders”
empireOfLove@lemmy.one 7 months ago
This is how gold standard currencies work (or used to work). Most western currencies like the US dollar used to be permanently pegged to a specific value of gold (the Bretton-Woods system) and the dollar was meant to be redeemable for gold. But because of the impracticality of handling and storing actual physical metals actual trade was almost never handled in gold.
In reality, the US financial system already kind of runs like your “dystopian future”, and has done so since 1971. There is no inherent value to a US dollar besides the federal government saying “trust me bro”.
baldingpudenda@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The fact that people give money to the US, or any country, for essentially an IOU slip of paper promising to pay you back with interest is so weird.
Speaking of gold reminds me of this sci-fi book where aliens come to earth and cause damage. They ask how they can make things right and are explained gold and the monetary system. They go oh, we can totally filter gold from the oceans and pay you back in tons of gold per day. This caused panic as the huge influx would crash the system. I think it was an asimov short story.
snooggums@kbin.social 7 months ago
Anything other than direct trade will be based on trust, since even precious metals like gold only hold a certain value because of trust.
saigot@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
IDK it really, to me pegging the value to some arbitrary piece of metal seems weirder. If we actually traded real gold and the government decided “hey no, that doesn’t count” you’d be forced to give it back anyway, and they could also force you to do it for no gold. Monetary value only ever had one real source and that’s the person with sufficient force to enforce the trade, which in any stable country is the government.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 7 months ago
Funnily enough about that “forced to give back real gold used for trade”, the US kinda did that at one point, making it for a time illegal to possess more than a certain amount of gold and requiring people give anything over that amount to the government for a set price.
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s not weird once you realize that almost nothing has any inherent value if it isn’t food, medicine, ammunition, or fuel.
Gold does not have any inherent value. It has value for the exact same reason money does, only fist currency isn’t prone to the problems a gold standard causes.
theneverfox@pawb.social 7 months ago
Oh, it’s so much weirder than that. When you take a loan, the bank just creates the money based on a percentage of their deposits. Then, they can count that deposit as part of their “real” money. They now have a debt, which does not count against their “real” money
They can then package the loans together, and sell those. This is again “real” money, so can be deposited and used to give out more loans.
But wait! You’re probably thinking “that’s way too simple, let’s run statistics on this!” You’d be right, welcome to the first layer of modern banking.
What happens if a bunch of people can’t repay? Then the bank hides whatever money they can before admitting they can’t make their payments, collapses, and a federal banking system takes over to repackage the assets and loans to another bank (usually without the customers noticing). Or the government writes you a bailout check.
You might think “wait, my constitution says who can print money, why do we have to take loans?” Because they haven’t declassified what happened to the last US president who thought private banks probably shouldn’t be given the monopoly to print money.
What happens if this happens all at once? Well that’s the government’s problem. They can devalue their currency by printing more money or take a loan from the world bank.
Then, you get a bank official that gets to take over your country’s finances. Depending how much the US likes you and how hard you bend over, either you get austerity and they sell off your economic future for a bit more cash now, and you get milked for tax dollars indefinitely, or they cut you a deal, and they give you a way out eventually if you do everything they say.
You might think you could just let the banks fail, but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom.
You might think about pinning the printing of money to exchange rates or to tax income and managing the banking system socially (since the risk is socialized, why let someone take the profits?), but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom, comrade.
You should probably stop thinking about other systems before you look a little low on freedom, this is how banking and money work.
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This is not at all how banking or money works lol
This is like half true, but misremembered, shit and half just insane conspiracy theory.
BB69@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The value of the dollar is the battleships, war planes, and nuclear missiles.
WhiteHawk@lemmy.world 7 months ago
How many battleships is a dollar?
AlwaysNowNeverNotMe@kbin.social 7 months ago
Hey they just audited fort Knox back in 1953 and it was all good no reason to go poking around.
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 7 months ago
do you have the graph? gotta show the graph.