Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions

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 They can pass it on by sticking it in the bank or give it away in return for capital — that is, ''invest it'' — in something that will be productive over time in an a way that an inert cash instrument in your pocket will not. Capital. An ''asset''.
-The thing about assets is that they are awkward. They are not to everybody’s taste. They are idiosyncratic; fallible: they rust, can go off or out of fashion, they cost money to store generally just difficult things to use as a medium of exchange. In the conventional (fairy) story of the history of money, this indeed was why money came about in the first place as a substitute for the inconvenience of barter.<ref>{{author|David Graeber}}’s book is compelling that this is a fairy story with no grounding in reality. Currency always was, from the outset, evidence of indebtedness.</ref>
+The thing about particular capital assets is that they are awkward. They are not to everybody’s taste. They are idiosyncratic; fallible: they take up space, require refrigeration, can rust, go off or go out of fashion. They cost money to maintain and store. They are bad things to use as a medium of exchange.
+But, despite the conventional (fairy) story of the history of money, money did not come about in the first place as a substitute for the inconvenience of barter.<ref>{{author|David Graeber}}’s book is compelling that this is a fairy story with no grounding in reality.</ref> Currency was ''always'', from the outset, a means of creating [[indebtedness]].
+This is because indebtedness is not an intrinsically bad thing.
 Indebtedness is ''bad'' for a list of reasons Farrington sets out in good detail. If only we could find something that was both an asset ''and'' had the abstract, fungible, transparent, clear nature of a currency — but, critically, ''did not depreciate or imply any form of indebtedness'' — all would be well in our new Crypto-Venice.