morlockelloi on Wed, 4 May 2016 21:39:11 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Live Your Models


If the currency is inflationary, then it's useless as a vehicle for savings, leaving only local-force-monopoly-backed notion of "property" as the savings method. If it is not global, it's useless outside the local fiefdom and subject to whims of the local government.

The above has been observed in vivo: in pre-fall East Europe (and many other countries today), local currency was good for paying monthly expenses; all savings was in 'hard' currency, although this was frequently illegal. Sometimes the amount of savings was $50, sometimes much more, but it was ubiquitous among the poor and the rich.

Good part of population would have a problem with touting inflationary local currency as a cure for neoliberalism. It's not, as 1960s hippie communes were not cure for anything, especially not 'the system'.

Debt is a separate phenomenon, and not necessarily related to non-fiat currencies, possession does not automatically imply debt, eg. if I invest my time into digging gold, and find some, who owes me? Debt is predicated on enforcement capabilities, without which it does not exist (without enforcement, there is no debt, but there is gold.)

On 5/3/16, 13:31, Florian Cramer wrote:

    Since mining of Bitcoins is artificially capped (when the predetermined
    number of Bitcoins has been reached and can no longer be extended),
    deflation is hard-wired into Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was the global
    currency, and some people would have assets in Bitcoin while others
    would have debt in it (since on a macroeconomic scale, every monetary
    asset of someone is someone else's debt), automatic deflation would mean
    that the richer get automatically richer while the poorer are drowned in
    automatically increasing, never repayable debt.

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