4d ago

That's a very good question!

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Money isn't real but the idea everyone agrees on subconsciously is it is a medium of exchange.
You have a goat and I have 50 apples. You want my apples but I don't want your goat. OK. Bye bye, good luck finding the next customer.
Or
Sell the goat for the value of 50 apples, and then I can turn that into the new lamp I wanted instead.
Not everyone wants a goat but if you can float the value of something as an IOU (cash) then it's useful.
Same reason why people like crypto, it's the idea of cash but with math securing it's scarcity vs guns and vaults of gold.
- You have a goat and I have 50 apples. You want my apples but I don’t want your goat. OK. Bye bye, good luck finding the next customer.
  In the real world:
  Ok, I'll let you have my apples, but you owe me.
  Or
  You want some apples? Sure, have some!
  The world operated on debt and gifts for a long time before monetary systems were common. Debt was sometimes formal, sometimes informal. Gifts were sometimes pure acts of generosity, sometimes they were rituals.
  
  Maybe that worked when you knew everyone in town or that they'd be where you can find them again, but not in a global economy. You can't lend Joe Random 3 goats and he will pay you back if he simply is in another country doing business or is in town for the weekend. Try getting in your car and telling a random shop you don't have cash but you'll pay them back. This logic goes out the window as soon as you involve strangers.
  
  Try getting in your car and telling a random shop you don’t have cash but you’ll pay them back.
  What do you think a credit card is?
  
  I'm confused, your first post is about how we need to go back to bartering and personal debt one on one without involving banks or money, and now you are advocating credit cards? What's the message here? Those are 2 different things.
  
  I'm saying that bartering was never a real thing that happened, at least not on any large scale. I'm also saying that debt existed long before currency. So, this idea that there was a difficulty when someone had a goat and someone else had 50 apples, that wasn't a real problem that ever happened.
  Even once currency was fairly common, paying for 50 apples in currency was rare. Most of the time, things were handled using debt and/or gifts. For example, roman coins are common, but the number of coins actually in circulation in roman times was tiny compared to the size of the roman economy. That's because the most common arrangement was debt, which was often paid back not in coin but by returning something that offset or canceled the debt.

110 comments