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Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

Money is a contract with the state. It expires with the state.

Physical paper bills also do wear out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old...

Soft money is a contract with the state, hard money doesn't expire. A $1 silver dollar coin from 1901 is worth a heck of a lot more than a $1 bill from the same time.

The value of that $1 silver coin is either the market value of the silver, or the sentimental value to collectors. It not functionally money anymore.

The notion of "hard money" is a joke.

> The notion of "hard money" is a joke.

Why? I don't even think modern Keynesians would argue against commodities this confidently, maybe MMT's would?

I guess we should distinguish money from commodities, though? For money to mean something different to commodities, it must enjoy a privileged legal and social role, by virtue of its ability to satisfy tax obligations to the state and debt obligations to other private citizens. I guess the "joke" is that we used to think the value of money derived primarily from its commodity backing. Which was maybe true in some particular historical periods but not true whenever state power was durable, as it is today.

Hard money can expire, sort of.

Hard money is a contract with generalized civilization that only has value so long as civilization continues to organize and complexify our resources. A $1 silver dollar coin still has a lot of objective value because civilization still provides lots of good and useful stuff for us to consume.

If we get to the point where a silver dollar has no value, we're either in a Star Trek where you can make as many as you want, at no cost... or we're past Nate Hagen's "Great Simplification", and worse off than the dark ages... Younger Dryas catastrophe level stuff

Or a huge cache of cheaply minable silver is found, or some fancy technology to extremely cheaply extract silver from the tailings of another resource, or a government decides to dump silver reserves onto the market to destabilize some economy somewhere.

I fully agree that the value of silver is very unlikely to crater but it's not exactly Star Trek unlikely.

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