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Comment by antasvara | Hacker News Reader

What concerns me about his idea is that businesses would be less incentivized to take payments if your money was closer to expiration. This could lead to situations where my dollar is worth significantly less near expiration than someone else's dollar that just got stamped. In this respect, businesses get screwed because the money that they just accepted is slowly deflating in value.

Expiring money basically incentivizes short term thinking over long term goals. Businesses won't save for improvements, retirement won't exist, etc.

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I have not thought about this too much but what if the expiry date resets when it changes hands and there is some tx fee to discourage passing money around unnecessarily?

I quite like that idea.

If you receive a dollar and pay tax on it due to the work you undertook to receive it, it gets 'refreshed' and increases in value.

If you get a 'stale dollar' (e.g. gifted from a parent) it depreciates until you use it constructively.

If you're an advocate of "trickle-down" economics, you should be lapping this us, as it's rewarding people for what you believe already happens.

Of course a much simpler approach would be to simply flip the outrageously stupid system most of us have, where income from passive investments is taxed at a lower rate than income from providing work.

Isn’t this essentially what interest rates are for?

Stated more generally, it breaks the concept of fungibility. One unit of currency would no longer be interchangable with another unit of currency. This makes it harder to use because now each bill has to be inspected before acceptance.

I think this is negated by the fact that the expiration date resets when the money is exchanged hands.

I think you’re right... it seems to me like this would only work if it was accompanied by a law along the lines of this money having some final redemption value, or some venues that were required to accept it.

For example if this “stamped money” expired at the end of the year, everyone is required to accept it until then, and for six months afterward it can be redeemed at a bank for fifty cents on the dollar... then instead of people refusing to take it you’d have a big flurry of holiday shopping but increasing prices for stamped money at the end as its value neared the drop off. You would also have some people probably try to gamble on acquiring a lot of that money at a discount before its expiration thinking they could flip it in time or acquire it for less than its redemption value from people who just wanted to unload it.

It’s an interesting thought experiment.

But I think in today’s world of mostly electronic money, something like this would be much harder to pull off. It would presumably only apply to cash - since the entire banking system would have to revise itself to track expiring dollars separately - and I think rather than seeing a lot of adoption you’d be more likely to see many businesses suddenly stop accepting cash entirely.

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