alt Hacker NewsThat's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it had something to do with alleviating the not-enough-stuff problems that we faced.
The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed.
But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us.
The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better.
So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto.
We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.
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Thanks for sharing your perspective. It’s reminding me of how I was feeling about crypto in the early days. I begin specifying a project on those lines way back when and the ideas behind it are still interesting. Maybe you’ll enjoy: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
>But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures...
That's an enormous claim and I really doubt it.
I don't really agree with your framing.
Something like Amazon is a partnership between the capital class and, to zeroth-order, everybody else, to screw over a small slice of the proletariat (their own employees and retail / warehouse workers) and the bourgeoisie (brick-and-mortar store owners).
It sucks when the capitalist Eye of Sauron focuses on however you make your living as a thing-to-make-more-efficient but when it lands on how someone else makes their living shit gets cheaper.
> When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor
That abstraction is simple debt. Your employer is, in exchange for what you've given them, promising to return to you something of value (food, shelter, entertainment, etc.) in the future. Money is the account of the promise made. The alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value at the time of the transaction. However, any negative externalities associated with you choosing what item of value you want to trade for exists whether you demand it immediately or defer acceptance until some time in the future. Trying to find a new way to practice accounting isn't going to change anything.