reading david graeber's Debt and learning a lot about what makes the world go round, and it sure isn't "money"
so the cliche narrative for currency starts out using it as a unit of accounting, has it as a mechanism for exchange, and ends up with it storing value...
but before that, it has to kill & eat its ancestors, and it often mis-identifies them as barter, and, perhaps, more correctly, as haggle...
but how would barter actually be a thing? what are the chances, especially in a hunter gatherer community, but even in a simple agrarian society, that I have the very thing you want in the right quantity, and the same time as you have what I want? lets take 150 people and think it through....no, lets not - its just silly. you'd keep some sort of notional tally - indeed, it would be part of your social network - you'd know all those people in your 150 network, how much you "trust" them, and in particular, how much you owe them or they owe you...since when....and whether you ever need to "collect"...
secondly, why would I think something that's worth a handful of fruits to you, is worth a handful of fruits to someone else? more likely, from each according to her means to each according to her needs. obviously - hence, looking at medieval society, a blacksmith would "charge" his lordship hundreds of times the debt that he'd charge his neighbour, the farmer or baker or coalminer, to shoe a horse....the farmer needs the horse to plough the field to grow the wheat to give to the baker to make the bread the blacksmith eats while making horseshoes...the lord only needs shiny horseshoes to look smart at the joust.
lefties ? no, just there's a lot more to how things would work in a truly human economy. a richer world view.
So how would a blockchain support this diversity? certainly not through a blockchain currency. but perhaps through smart contracts, which would unwrap between people, recording, and timeshifting but also value-shifting depending on who the players are on each step of the transaction chain.
a medieval, social-networked based distributed ledger/smart contract/chain space?
so the cliche narrative for currency starts out using it as a unit of accounting, has it as a mechanism for exchange, and ends up with it storing value...
but before that, it has to kill & eat its ancestors, and it often mis-identifies them as barter, and, perhaps, more correctly, as haggle...
but how would barter actually be a thing? what are the chances, especially in a hunter gatherer community, but even in a simple agrarian society, that I have the very thing you want in the right quantity, and the same time as you have what I want? lets take 150 people and think it through....no, lets not - its just silly. you'd keep some sort of notional tally - indeed, it would be part of your social network - you'd know all those people in your 150 network, how much you "trust" them, and in particular, how much you owe them or they owe you...since when....and whether you ever need to "collect"...
secondly, why would I think something that's worth a handful of fruits to you, is worth a handful of fruits to someone else? more likely, from each according to her means to each according to her needs. obviously - hence, looking at medieval society, a blacksmith would "charge" his lordship hundreds of times the debt that he'd charge his neighbour, the farmer or baker or coalminer, to shoe a horse....the farmer needs the horse to plough the field to grow the wheat to give to the baker to make the bread the blacksmith eats while making horseshoes...the lord only needs shiny horseshoes to look smart at the joust.
lefties ? no, just there's a lot more to how things would work in a truly human economy. a richer world view.
So how would a blockchain support this diversity? certainly not through a blockchain currency. but perhaps through smart contracts, which would unwrap between people, recording, and timeshifting but also value-shifting depending on who the players are on each step of the transaction chain.
a medieval, social-networked based distributed ledger/smart contract/chain space?
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