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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

In games, even when the game is explicitly designed not to have currency, players will invent one in order to facilitate trade. It'd be strange if humans didn't do this in real life too.

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As an example, in Ark, people use cementing paste as a currency. It's very time-intensive to make, stacks a lot, is not terribly heavy, and high-level crafting and building needs it in solar-mass-esque quantities.

Sure. But we are aware of the concept.

It would be interesting to see this emerge in a population unaware or unexposed to the concept of money.

Economists have known for a long time that there is something fundamental about the human condition that leads to the emergence of money, or some approximation of it that serves the same purposes. Where they have struggled to make solid progress is in formalizing the "frictions" that make money an essential component of equilibrium economic models.

The article states that exactly this is not the case.

...huh? The article talks about the lack of evidence for barter economies. How does that falsify my comment in any sense? Anyways, I made my statement based on what I've learned from reading academic research in economics, not on whatever this guy from The Atlantic said.

I imagine this has been studied to some extent in various uncontacted tribes. Does anyone have any information on that?

The first chapter in "Debt: the first 5000 years" deals with the issue.

This is one of those things where I wonder if we are just so inured to the idea of currency that we cannot conceive of people that don't work that way. It's really hard not to bring anachronism into history and try to put yourself in the mindspace of people who didn't necessarily have the same unconscious framework of thought baked into them.

I think it comes down to the fact that a hub and spoke model, where relative values only have to be maintained and agreed upon into and out of a single commodity are easier for humans to conceptualize and agree upon at-large than complete (or worse yet and more likely, incomplete) graphs.

I think that's sort of true. Most people who play games together are friends, and servers in practice function based on gifts.

Using money in these games is perhaps as much a form of roleplay as it is an economy.

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