Oh look! Another bubble
(twitter.com)
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Comments like these make me wonder how a society would function without money. Given how fake and gay our currency is becoming its getting increasingly hard to actually figure out what the real value of something is or should be.
Money is inevitable.
Letting bankers and governments conjure it out of thin air is the problem.
I think sci-fi has the right of it, the next form of currency in the near future might be some form of energy credit system.
What, like some form of fuel currency? A Petrodollar if you will?
Yes, except modernized for the fuel that is more universally relevent in a world with gigawatt server farms and most electricity isn't generated by petrol generators.
That's not right, because it implies energy is ultimately the only thing that has value, but there's also land, craftmanship and others. Making money solely about energy is like making money about gold: it's a step back in the abstraction of value that money is.
Money's not supposed to represent everything of value, it's an just abstract representation of value.
It's just much more stable if it's tied to something that has almost universal nominal value to most people. Like you have 10 cows and need a car, but the car salesman is vegetarian. Rather than barter in circles every time we need something we can instead habitually trade our specialty goods for a certain value of a good with near universal demand, which energy fits pretty well because we all like to have lights on in our homes (Amish not withstanding) and electricity is a near universal cost of modern manufacturing. Money is just an extra step of abstraction from that, where instead of having to physically have the goods in question, you can just have a reasonably secure promise that the money can be always traded for said goods.
Money is a proxy for barter. Instead of having to barter 300 eggs for a video game, you can sell them to the people raising cows and pigs.
Money is a proxy for debt.
No two bartering entities have exactly the right things for eachother at that moment.
Barter requires debt.
Genuine question: barter is trading what i have on hand for what you have on hand. How can debt even exist in that system?
I don't think "barter" actually implies on hand. It just means without money as an intermediary.
"I'll give you a defined amount of seed in the planting season and you'll give me a defined amount of wheat in the harvest season," is still barter. And that would be a form of debt.
I don't have 30 eggs today. I have 5. I'll have 30 by Friday.
I need the bolt of cloth from you today though. If I don't get it I can't make the eggs.
This is contrived, but you see how short term debt automatically must exist for barter to be actually successful?
A futures contract is the modern day abstraction of barter. I'll buy your corn harvest before you even plant it. In exchange you get all the money to actually grow the corn up front. This is just a debt contract.