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Comment by blobbers | Hacker News Reader

> To the author that talked about writing yourself a bunch of IOUs and claiming it gives you wealth, that's essentially what the US Government does, but at a different scale. They write debt denominated in their own currency.

This is such a bad take. Government-issued money in itself is not equivalent to private debt, and has never been. It is an academically heterodox and often politically charged view of what money really is.

Where do promissory notes issued by individual private savings-and-loan banks (as most paper money was in the 1800s) fall on that spectrum?

They weren’t “legal tender”

Is the difference that you can use gov-issued money to pay taxes but not private debt? I.e. government money printing is different to crypto printing in that the gov IOUs are legally acceptable by the government.

If so, they seem similar enough for the parent take to be accurate. The gov Bond has to be paid back eventually, so it's exactly like an IOU, even if the Fed can print money and buy shitloads of these bonds.

Then why did you leave off the clear reason that easily refutes the misconception? Were you just depending on the status signals to carry your refutation?

Seriously, I don’t get why people proclaim such confident views and then neglect to share their knowledge and insights. “Fake it till you make it”?

the government backs its currency by having _different rights_ than private companies. E.g. the ability to levy taxes and field an army. We the citizens have given them those rights specifically so that they are the highest authority.

This is why a currency that derives from them is better than a currency that derives from anonymous scammers on the internet.

Did you mean to reply to the grandparent of my comment, to which that would be responsive? I was asking why the parent of my comment “contributed” with an argument from “that’s a low status belief” rather than a comment more like yours.

yep, but now it's flagged so I can't move it.

If Celsius was backed by the full faith and credit of the US economy and war machine then those Celsius Bucks would probably still have value.

Agreed. “The government does it, why can’t we?” is just being deliberately naive. In the hands of the U.S. government it’s monetary policy - in mine it’s literally a scam.

There’s a fascinating lesson and wake-call in monetary theory and philosophy somewhere here for us, but I’m not sure anybody wants to learn it.

That's what I meant by different scale; not in terms of total valuation. Their celsius bucks clearly do not carry the backing of taxation, land, government, or military.

I believe Celsius was lending out staked crypto and paying in their Celsius tokens as a form of "interest" though its unclear what if anything was backing the Celsius token (or if new tokens were simply minted).

The leant stake crypto paid interest and they then used 20% of the returns to fund their R&D and 80% to pay back stake owners. It seems if you accepted Celsius tokens rather than other denominations the payout would be higher.

It's not clear what caused their bankruptcy though; I can only imagine that they had counterparty risk in the people they had leant their tokens to.

It would have been really interesting if any of these crypto companies bought a bunch of tanks when times were good. That sounds like a good sci-fi novel and an interesting ending.

You can't buy armed tanks as a private company. That's a sovereign privilege.

Just buy the tank manufacturer.

But seriously, there are lots of ways to invest in a private military capability that are legal and miles more efficient than tanks. Guarantee you that's happening.

Have you heard about PMCs (private military company)? Some of them own tanks. Generally you do not have to be sovereign to buy tank - you just need friendly government.

You're right. You have to build them in secret like Cobra Command!

I appreciate that my initial comment somehow led to this comment.

Did Cobra Command pay in crypto? (and if so, which coin did it use?)

Maybe they can pay the stamp fees under the NFA for the tank ammo with crypto

For SOTs the NFA fee is just $5!

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