83,358
edits
Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
||
| Line 133: | Line 133: | ||
Farrington correctly sees a “fiat currency” as necessarily an instrument of [[indebtedness]]: a person who holds it has a promise for value from someone else. He doesn’t say so but he may say regard [[indebtedness]] as, in itself, a form of compulsory trust — trust on pain of enforcement by the state, i.e., ''violence'' — and therefore intrinsically undesirable. | Farrington correctly sees a “fiat currency” as necessarily an instrument of [[indebtedness]]: a person who holds it has a promise for value from someone else. He doesn’t say so but he may say regard [[indebtedness]] as, in itself, a form of compulsory trust — trust on pain of enforcement by the state, i.e., ''violence'' — and therefore intrinsically undesirable. | ||
Graeber might agree about currency, and monetary indebtedness, but not indebtedness in general. To the contrary, mutual, perpetual, rolling ''non-monetary'' indebtedness is exactly the glue that binds a community together. It creates ''voluntary'' trust. That kind of trust — credit — is fundamental to how any functioning civilisation works. Discharging that sort of indebtedness releases us from our ties and obligations to each other — thereby dissolves the “community of interest”. One of the things that | Graeber might agree about currency, and monetary indebtedness, but not indebtedness in general. To the contrary, mutual, perpetual, rolling ''non-monetary'' indebtedness is exactly the glue that binds a community together. It creates ''voluntary'' trust. That kind of trust — credit — is fundamental to how any functioning civilisation works. Discharging that sort of indebtedness releases us from our ties and obligations to each other — thereby dissolves the “community of interest”. One of the things that Graeber finds so pernicious about [[indebtedness]] is that it is precisely quantifiable: it sets a precise value for loyalty, and therefore a price at which loyalty may be discharged. The vagueness and irreconcilability of “social” indebtedness makes this a lot harder to do. | ||
====Currency as an anti-asset==== | ====Currency as an anti-asset==== | ||
Currency, on this view is tokenised, accountable unit of trust. That is a glass-half-full way of describing indebtedness — not financial indebtedness to or from a specific person, as arises under a loan contract, but disembodied, abstract indebtedness ''in and of itself''. This is quite an odd concept. | Currency, on this view is tokenised, accountable unit of trust. That is a glass-half-full way of describing indebtedness — not financial indebtedness to or from a specific person, as arises under a loan contract, but disembodied, abstract indebtedness ''in and of itself''. This is quite an odd concept. | ||