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Comment by baobabKoodaa | Hacker News Reader

We could quibble about the definition of "special power" all day. Sure, a bank is in a better position to create money than a poker site. And a poker site is in a better position than an individual person. But these are not fundamental differences, these are differences of degree. Fundamental difference is having a literal money printer, versus not having one (central bank's ability vs regular bank). When you issue IOUs with the backing of a literal money printer (as a central bank), those IOUs are fundamentally different from the IOUs issued by me/poker site/bank.

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This is silly. Yes, there is a difference of degree and nature between A and B here. Are you saying that there is no similar gap between the banks and regular people in terms of their power to create money? Because that's patently nonsense.

And I mean, the vast majority of money in circulation does not come from the money printer or even the central bank's own ability to duplicate money, it comes from the multiplicative recirculation by banks.

The banks have been both legally empowered and de facto relied on to do this money creation on behalf of the government in ways that other people and organizations are not allowed to do.

Just witness the largely successful regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency services, or the fact that "point exchange systems" like Xbox live points to to great lengths to insist that their points are not recoverable into dollars to avoid regulations as actual evidence that banks are not accidental money creators but an empowered subsystem of the process of making money exist.

Well, legal barriers aside, Amazon could print their own currency and be in the same position as the Fed.

Though to make it absolutely the same position, Amazon's currency should not be tied to the dollar but freely floating.

Then there can be no run on Amazon's currency, just like there can be no run on the dollar. However, of course, both Amazon's currency and the dollar can lose in value compared to goods and services or other currencies.

"legal barriers aside" is insane, legal barriers aside I'm off to rob a bank. There's only really two or three things that could possibly make banks different: the law, de facto capital requirements to enter the market and hidden knowledge, and you can normally buy hidden knowledge so the thing distinguishing banks from anyone else is either the law or money, and it's mostly the law.

> "legal barriers aside" is insane, legal barriers aside I'm off to rob a bank.

Well, that's not just a legal barrier there, but also that the people on the other side of that transaction don't like to be robbed.

People deal in currency blackmarkets all the time, and all participants are willing. Obviously, being able to do business out in the open is much more efficient and productive. And especially eg Amazon as an above board organisation could not engage in blackmarket operations without endangering their legal activities.

so if amazon came to you to buy your house with amazon bucks, would you sell it? If you worked for amazon, would you accept amazon bucks as salary?

The question isn't so much whether I would accept, but at what price I would accept.

If Amazon is selling their own stuff for Amazon bucks (and people still want to buy stuff from Amazon so that Amazon bucks have a non-zero market price), there's a minimum finite amount of Amazon bucks that I would gladly accept.

If Amazon bucks weren't very commonly used (think like bitcoin today), I would probably ask for a premium over USD just to make up for the inconvenience of having to exchange them.

If Amazon bucks were more commonly used in daily life than USD, I might even accept a slight discount.

> If you worked for amazon, would you accept amazon bucks as salary?

That's actually an even easier question. Amazon already pays their employees partially in Amazon stock. At a big enough stock offering (and frequent enough vesting), I'd happily accept an all shares compensation.

Now, Amazon bucks would be different from Amazon shares. But the only thing that matters to me when accepting compensation in shares is how easy it is for me to convert the shares (or bucks!) into something I actually want later.

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