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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

The novels Going Postal and Making Money by Terry Pratchett actually use this as a plot device; they're comic Fantasy books that roughly parallel the invention of fiat currency.

It goes from people starting to use stamps instead of coins because they were lightweight and "backed by the government" for postage, to people slowly accepting notes of credit which are backed by gold in a vault, to people realizing that the notes aren't really backed by the gold, so much as they are by the city-state's entire economy and potential to do useful work.

"What is the value of a coin compared to that of the hand that holds it?"

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One of my favorite quotes from Making Money, discussing the true power of gold:

"It’s in the city itself. The city says: In exchange for that gold, you will have all these things. The city is the magician, the alchemist in reverse. It turns worthless gold into…everything."

I like the sentiment, but the actual thing used to cut people into the value of that economy has utility that can be priced in terms of that actual thing.

Imagine you lived in an economy where all you had to do was pay robots in the required electricity to gather the requisite resources (from somehow politically uncontested, infinite stores), assemble them, and deliver the product to you (or you to your destination, etc). The cost of storing that electricity, and transferring it to them would be accountable in electricity (the purchase of the manufacture of batteries in electricity, the electricity losses due to transformation and heat loss on the wires, etc).

Humans have thus far been really bad at amortizing the costs of the actual things they're transacting with. It may be impossible, but Bitcoin is the first system that seems to have attempted a solution.

You might like The Just City, by Jo Walton. I was kind of ambivalent about it, but it was a reasonably fun speculative fiction about Athena gathering people from throughout time to recreate the city that Plato laid out in Republic.

To make that possible, she provides robots which can understand basic instructions and act semi-autonomously to build things, farm, etc, but fall well short of actual sapience. And after awhile, she introduces a gadfly named Socrates into the fledgling city.

Welp, when I saw the title of the article my thought was "Wait what ?! Terry Pratchett Going Postal was actually based on real facts ?"

Those two books are among my favourites, but I was really not expecting that part to be true

One of my favorite authors, an part of the reason I found the article!

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