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Right. I feel like that’s nit picking (your parent; not you.) Of course I (teacher) don’t buy potatoes by teaching the farmer’s children Dijkstra. Instead of
by gorgoiler 6y ago
Right. I feel like that’s nit picking (your parent; not you.)
Of course I (teacher) don’t buy potatoes by teaching the farmer’s children Dijkstra.
Instead of bartering we chooses to track our debts. Using Bitcoin as a cryptographically secure distributed debt tracker sounds great.
But Bitcoin right now feels like a bunch of technology enthusiasts have blessed the world with such a debt tracker while also saying ”btw you collectively owe us $630,000,000,000 worth of stuff”.
- 317070 6y agoAlso, this digital debt tracker uses numbers, which most of these communal debt systems do not do. Because different people put different value to things, tracking debt in numbers is not how it is done (the book goes in a lot of detail how this works). This is what makes bitcoin a currency, a way to track debts rather than having them implicit. I'm not sure where on the globe you are at, but where I am from, groups of friends buy rounds of beers at the bar. You do not keep track of whose turn it is to pay the round or whether someone is buying more expensive stuff, but since you are friends you make sure things are fair over time. But implicitly, not tracking numbers and accounts. And Graeber argues that that is actually the method that predates currency. Not barter. I fully agree on the hilariously large "primordial" debt we somehow owe the early miners.
- pharmakom 6y agoBitcoin does not track debt, it tracks Bitcoin assets.