Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

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There are many more problems than that.

We treat it as a proxy for consent, and it fails horribly at that job.

Given perfect information, I'd avoid feeding you if I knew your mining operation was poisoning my drinking water. Money hides that from me. I see one dollar the same as any other, accept yours in exchange for food, and go home to drink the poisoned water--an outcome I could've avoided if I mapped that dollar back to the event that created it: a loan in support of a venture that harms my community.

The banks that create money have no incentive to ensure broadly favorable outcomes result from their decisions. Profit is sufficient for them. It's a status quo that we should be furious about, since we bear the brunt of the negative outcomes.

Absence of money does not at all imply perfect information. The problem you describe would occur equally with an ordinary debt between two parties, or barter, or indeed any system that doesn't entail the (laborious, impractical, necessarily incomplete) gathering of perfect information.

Yes but money is perfectly situated to carry the missing information in this case. If it's legitimate, it was issued by a bank. Which bank? To whom? For what venture?

The fact that it doesn't is by design. It deliberately obfuscates its origin to create fungibility.

But in a climate of rampant corruption its not a suitable design choice (and maybe it never was) because now it's starting to look like all dollars are equally illegitimate. Continuing to use them appears to be encouraging outcomes that will hurt me. That's totally contrary to the point of money. The baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.

The fix is to make it risky to hold currency that was issued in support of an antisocial endeavor. And the way to do that is to make the money carry extra information about the conditions of its issuance so that if the backed venture has harmful outcomes, holders of the associated dollars will have a hard time finding somebody to accept their money.

If we want it to be a proxy for consent, it has to actually provide enough information for that consent to be rational.

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