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That's a good question. Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than th
by jerf 6y ago
That's a good question.
Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than the whole world.
One thing that would have to happen is everyone else would develop their own money/currency, which would turn mean that the one person with all the money is no longer the one person with all the money.
A thing quite likely to happen is that everyone would decide that whatever the money is that the one person has, everybody would decide it is not money.
It isn't entirely dissimilar from me claiming I have all the Jerfoleans on the world, and what the world is really doing about that currency right now. They're worth a zero so zero-y that even an infinite number of them is still worth a flat zero. Someone who has "all the money" might find themselves in a similar boat.
- d0mine 6y agoMore likely the one person would hire some people to convince the rest that it in their best interests that all money belong to the one person or even more likely to provide to the people some distraction, destroy the notion of the facts, so they wouldn't even know to ask inconvenient questions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Dolores12 6y agoMoney used to represent the value backed up by gold in bank storage. Nowadays its just a paper, so indeed its easy to create new money.
- jwolfe 6y agoNot that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That was also arbitrary.
- gorgoiler 6y agoIt is hard to mine and hard to find. If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work. In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.
- panarky 6y ago> proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work Work for the sake of work is not valuable. You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20 feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up again. That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to anyone, except maybe as comedy.
- _flux 6y agoThe video wouldn't be valuable, because it's trivial to duplicate. However, should it be impossible to copy videos and the only way to do a video would be to capture the events as they happen, then perhaps your video would have value.
- riffraff 6y agoI'm surprised there aren't a ton of NFTs for videos of people digging holes and filling them up, riffing on both "proof of work" and keynesian ideas.
- iamacyborg 6y agoWhy do actual work when you can just sell somebody elses as your own?
- imtringued 6y agoThe reasoning behind keynesian gold digging is that rich people will not accept that the government hands out money to poor people because that would threaten private businesses who are dependent on cheap labor. To make sure that the government money doesn't compete with private money you just force people to do worthless work so that working as a waiter for minimum wage is still more attractive than digging holes in summer heat. The entire point is that digging holes sucks. Meanwhile cryptocurrencies glorify digging holes.