Hacker News Reader

Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

Just on a tangent here I'm just wondering about the accounting process and mental gymnastics required to "destroy" money in the modern world with digital transfers, etc.

Can you have a process where a bank balance is decreased without transferring the money somewhere else? Do you have to buy cash and then burn it?

View on HN

Cash and burn is the way to go, you want something locally verifiable but globally hard to track

Give it to the central bank.

Maybe this is a use case for crypto. You can buy bitcoin and destroy the key.

That would do it. Although your would be incrementally pushing up the value of the remaining crypto which would be considered a bad side effect by many people.

"Buying crypto" is not a step in literally destroying money because the dollars used to buy crypto don't vanish, you just give them to the person selling you the crypto.

You would need to withdraw the dollars as cash and then set fire to the bills. That would destroy them by taking them out of circulation. If you exchange them for literally anything else you want to destroy, you're just changing ownerhsip of the money, not destroying it.

It depends if you count cryptocurrency as a currency; if you do, then it deflates that currency.

Similarly, if I have some Euros, use them to buy USD banknotes, set fire to the USD banknotes, that deflates USD but not Euros. (Would that inflate Euros instead? Or deflate both?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com