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> Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto. I came up with that idea in my teens (so looong before "crypto"), thinking about replacing

> Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto. I came up with that idea in my teens (so looong before "crypto"), thinking about replacing taxes with it: Deprecate your currency by the same percentage the state needs to run, have your central bank print the same amount of new currency for next year, and voila: Nobody pays taxes, the state gets its cut anyway, and the money supply remains constant because the X billion the public held at the start of last year are only 0.7 X billion at the end of it / start of the next and the other 0.3 X billion are freshly minted by the central bank for the government. This was before I learned that "the money supply" doesn't consist only (or even mainly) of cash, and that most "money" isn't actually created by state central banks but by the commercial banking system... But what can I say, it was in my teens. > Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not. Too discrete-step-ish. Deprecate at lest yearly, or if possible somehow smoothly over the year. Your second paragraph: Full (well, almost full) agreement.

jtsiskin 5y ago
If would also mean you can never hold cash or you’re losing money.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Yeah, so it would also have the advantage of discouraging money turning from a useful active medium of exchange to a passive "resource" to be hoarded and have rent extracted from -- yet another point in its favour, as I saw it. My initially unquestioned assumption was that since the money in your bank account is denominated in the same currency as cash, it would automatically lose value at the same rate as cash. Can't recall exactly when I realised that the presence of money in bank accounts might influence the value of cash in stead; still in my teens, I think. As I recall, I started speculating about whether my system would have to even things out between cash and bank accounts by obliging the banks to continuously adjust your balance down, or something. (Can't recall if transferring the reduction to the state as tax, or just msking it go "POOF!" and disappear.) Next thing, I probably realised there are yet other types of holdings than cash and savings accounts, and lots of other complications, so abandoned the idea. And then I guess I grew out of my teens.
wiml 5y ago
I also had that idea in my teens. Some time later it occurred to me that it's already mainstream, in a way: that's what inflation is doing, and that's why currencies are usually managed to have a low but nonzero rate of inflation.

jtsiskin 5y ago

If would also mean you can never hold cash or you’re losing money.

CRConrad 5y ago
Yeah, so it would also have the advantage of discouraging money turning from a useful active medium of exchange to a passive "resource" to be hoarded and have rent extracted from -- yet another point in its favour, as I saw it. My initially unquestioned assumption was that since the money in your bank account is denominated in the same currency as cash, it would automatically lose value at the same rate as cash. Can't recall exactly when I realised that the presence of money in bank accounts might influence the value of cash in stead; still in my teens, I think. As I recall, I started speculating about whether my system would have to even things out between cash and bank accounts by obliging the banks to continuously adjust your balance down, or something. (Can't recall if transferring the reduction to the state as tax, or just msking it go "POOF!" and disappear.) Next thing, I probably realised there are yet other types of holdings than cash and savings accounts, and lots of other complications, so abandoned the idea. And then I guess I grew out of my teens.

wiml 5y ago

I also had that idea in my teens. Some time later it occurred to me that it's already mainstream, in a way: that's what inflation is doing, and that's why currencies are usually managed to have a low but nonzero rate of inflation.