What is money, anyway?
What is money, anyway? From what I can tell, no human on earth understands the nature of money. There are only some people who are further away from the truth than others.<p>&gt;Save: When we save, we store our resources in something that is safe, liquid, and portable, a.k.a. money. This serves as a low-risk battery of future resource consumption across time and space.<p>No, that is not how any of this works. It literally doesn&#x27;t work like that. Think about it this way. If there is no money, then owning a car in 2000 and not doing anything with it will incur costs. You need to store the car, you need to clean it, you need to send it to inspections. It will lose its value as new models are introduced. The vast majority of physical capital depreciates.<p>When you are saving, you produce more than you consume, meaning you have idle physical capital. That physical capital can be given to someone that needs it, who will then give you money in exchange. The car isn&#x27;t gone. It&#x27;s not stored. It&#x27;s being used by someone else. If you spend the money to buy a new car, a new car has to be manufactured. When you think about it, what money is doing in this case is you are making an agreement in 2000. The deal is, you produce and I consume in 2000, in 2020 I produce and you consume.<p>If you were to reset the money system at the end of every year completely, then you would notice that anything produced within a year, must start being consumed within that year. Saving is the act of swapping the consumption and production relationship across production periods. When you consider the fact, that the human you are making an agreement with has to exist in the future, you should notice that starvation, aging and demographic declines are not some acts of theft or expropriation that humans born with the original sin of entropy commit behind your back.<p>The idea that there is a battery is wholly illogical. The fact that we even pretend that money lets us travel through time and space is the mistake rooted in most currency systems. You can&#x27;t store labor, nobody has invented a Futurama style freezer that preserves human bodies and even if we did, we would most likely run out of capacity sooner than later.<p>&gt;Invest: When we invest, we commit resources to a project that has a decent likelihood of multiplying our resources but also comes with a risk of losing them, by trying to provide some new value to ourselves or others.<p>This is incorrect again. As mentioned above, savings must be put to use or the human time that those savings represent a claim on will disappear without the futurama tech. This means that even if the likelihood of a return is zero and you are guaranteed a loss, you must still invest your savings or let someone else do it on your behalf.<p>&gt;The majority of people in the world don’t invest in financial assets; they are still on the consumption stage (basic necessities and daily entertainment) or the saving stage (money and home equity), either due to income constraints, consumption excesses, or because they live in part of the world that doesn’t have well-developed capital markets.<p>Or maybe it&#x27;s because young people aren&#x27;t born with land ownership and must buy it off some old fart?<p>&gt;Commodity Money<p>&gt;In this way of thinking, money should be divisible, portable, durable, fungible, verifiable, and scarce<p>Ancient egyptians didn&#x27;t get the memo. They didn&#x27;t have scarce money. They had money that was immediately available to anyone who worked, especially if said work was on a farm. Since money is immediately available, it doesn&#x27;t have to be reproduced or as people love calling it &quot;printed&quot;, there was no need to generate more of it if people are willing to give it up voluntarily. The idea, that money should be structured like land, so that you must get it from rich people, is a mistake. For a lot of poor people, borrowing with interest leads to a debt trap. So the alternative, is then to replicate the exclusive currency as those who have too little cannot get it from those who have too much. The solution is to stop making a currency exclusive to small fractions of the population. A lot of people complain about money printing and inflation, yet the money supply has risen so much faster than inflation, the excessive monetary savings of the rich have grown so fast and yet people complain that the saver is getting screwed despite having record levels of savings even adjusted by inflation. All that money isn&#x27;t ending up where it should be, so you can&#x27;t ever stop making more of it.<p>&gt;Durable means the money is easy to save across time; it does not rot or rust or break easily.<p>Said ancient egyptians had money that rots, which forced them to save in the way I outlined above. They actually had to do the production consumption time swap, they actually had to talk to people and seek agreement whether they want to be in debt. They can&#x27;t just hold onto money and extort the rest of the population by reminding them that they are mortal and that futurama freezers don&#x27;t exist and thereby force them to go into debt for the medium of exchange that is needed to trade with parties completely unrelated to the rich that can only be obtained through them. Unutilized capital simply disappears through rotting, giving the &quot;capitalist&quot; zero power over the rest of the population.<p>In other words, if money can be owned, then it cannot be merely an abstract unit of account. That money has to represent physical capital directly and in its entirety.<p>&gt;Unlike a dollar, which is an asset to you but a liability of some other entity, you can hold gold which is an asset to you and a liability to nobody else.<p>Yes, now notice the mistake. You can have an asset which requires the consent of the entire society that accepts gold as payment and you never ask them. You think you have an agreement even when nobody is on the other side. That is the true source of inflation. You plan to consume X amount of resources in the future but nobody agrees to produce X amount of resources at the time you want to consume, the prices of goods goes up. Deflation happens when someone plans to produce but nobody plans to consume in that time period. Thus, due to human psychology, there will be an endless cycle between booms and busts, due to the fact that production and consumption schedules are inherently mismatched as nobody is forced to make such an agreement, nobody is forced to make a plan for the future. Everyone has liquid money that can be spent at any moment, which makes it impossible for producers to anticipate what they have to produce. If the battery theory were correct, then inflation or deflation shouldn&#x27;t be possible as you can magically store everything including humans in your battery.