9 ms·

What if money expired?

116 points by rlnorthcutt 3y ago

b800h 3y ago
The author finally gets on to their real motivation for writing the piece near the end, where they call for 100% inheritence tax and the abolition of familial solidarity. The expiring money idea, as pointed out by others, is silly and would lead to asset and loan hoarding. But that isn't the point, the author is promoting an ideology that wants to move personal loyalty from the family to the state.
rlnorthcutt 3y ago
An interesting look at theories around "perishable" money. A very interesting concept. Most resources in the world have a lifespan - even an iron bar will eventually rust. However, a dollar is as perpetual as the system itself. On top of that, the entire economic system is designed to reward those who take more and give less - that is how you become rich, and being rich is the highest ideal. However, if money had a lifespan... if it could "decay" just like the crops we grow, then things would change. If you try to sell a bushel of corn today, and there isn't much demand, you will need to lower the price to sell it. This is because it will go bad and then you will have nothing. If you get paid a dollar today, and you know that dollar has a lifespan, then you are incentivized to spend it! If you have a million dollars that can expire, there isn't much use in holding or hoarding it... like the corn, it will go bad. So, you want to spend it - on things you need, or services, or by investing in equipment, training, research,etc. Heck - even just going on a trip or getting a nice meal is better than letting the money "rot" in a bank account. I'm not so sure that something like this would work at scale. It seems to be more workable in smaller circles, like a LETS or local trade system. Still, the thought experiment is useful, and I thnk it helps to highlight how some of the problems we face are actually baked into the system. From the article: 'Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.'
- bogantech 3y ago
  > A very interesting concept. Most resources in the world have a lifespan - even an iron bar will eventually rust. Gold doesn't though, we'd just end up back at hoarding / investing in gold
- garrickvanburen 3y ago
  Grain is quite stable under the right conditions (dry, cool), which is one of the reasons there can be a futures market for it and sales can happen over the winter and even the spring following a harvest. It wouldn’t surprise me if the origin of currency began with grain.
  - analog31 3y ago
    ... and possibly with futures. A clay tablet promising delivery of grain.
  - alsogutalsogut 3y ago
    [flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Call me cynical but I have a strong feeling that the wealthy elite who are already paying an entire cottage industry's worth of six-figure or more finance professionals and lawyers to dodge taxes will find a way to make this work for them too, while it creates an even stronger barrier to entering the truly monied classes from whatever remains of the middle class. If you want to get money moving in the economy again, we already know how to do that. Tax the shit out of the wealthy in such a way that they can't weasel out of it, and turn that money over to the people, be it through hiring them for public works projects, more and wider spread research grants, Universal Basic Income, or economic stimulus. We have tons of mechanisms to move money "down the hierarchy" as Dr. Peterson would say, but the problem is all of our politicians and media are owned by the very rich, and so taking money from the very rich is not on the table, which is how you do that. So we're left with this entire group of two professionals scratching their heads as to how we solve the problem of "the rich have too much money and the poor don't have enough" without having the rich give the poor money, which rather predictably lands at "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." I'm not even necessarily arguing pro or con here (though if you're curious, I'm extremely pro) I'm just saying that the rich accumulating too much is doing exactly what economists have always said it will do: it stalls the economy, and it will continue to do that. No amount of thumb on the scale by the rich will change this fundamental fact, and even some of them are saying this. If you totally strip mine the consumer base in the never ending pursuit of number-go-up, eventually you have no one left to sell your products to and then the entire game is over.
numtel 3y ago
Uh, our money does already expire. It's called inflation.
- abe_m 3y ago
  It is interesting how closely the proposals of Gesell are to current US Fed policy of 2% inflation. The main difference seems to be the current system runs on the Cantillion effect, where those in favoured positions (close to where the money is created) benefit from the inflation, while those farthest away bear the cost. In effect, it is the rich who are able to borrow direct from Central Banks and Government Treasuries get negative effective interest, and are able to parlay that into charging more interest to those farther down the chain, until you hit people paying 20+% on credit cards and payday loans. But as far as the perishable money, there are currently places like Turkey and Argentina where inflation is far higher than Gesell's proposed 5% inflation. Are those countries flourishing as a result of local inflation? It doesn't seem that way.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    2% is an entirely made up number though. "The 2 percent target widely adopted by central banks today originated from New Zealand, and surprisingly it came not from any academic study, but rather from an offhand comment during a television interview." https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves-2-percent-target-rate-inflation-0 https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves...
  - tiredofleftist 3y ago
    Quoting. "those in favoured positions, close to..." Add: "Investment is the production of capital goods, and the production of capital goods involves consumption." and: "Are those countries flourishing as a result of local inflation? It doesn't seem"...so ...Question I have: "This disinflation, i.e. near or almost deflation, been first contested - because some things actually became truly expensiver, but to determine inflation you did not need to calculate it as an average?", i want to ask.
- rlnorthcutt 3y ago
pphysch 3y ago
That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial). It's the only reasonable way to implement something like UBI: give everyone X "food credits" and Y "housing credits" each week. There would still be fraud and "credit laundering" to get around the expirations, but the overall waste would be tiny compared to the legacy finance system.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Do you have a study showing EBT cards are more effective and reduce fraud compared to direct cash subsidies?
- hakfoo 3y ago
  The problem isn't a lack of expiration, so much as it is relying on commercial middlemen. Nationalize the real-estate and you create a monopsony for housing credits. Open up state-run distribution centres that accept the food vouchers, and only redeem them there. The laundering/cashout concept relies on someone qualified to accept the credits and get real money back from the state. Stereotypically, this was a shady bodega or landlord who would fudge the books to claim they had enough sales to cover the vouchers they bought for 20% of face value. Going to direct fulfillment means they fall out of the loop: there's nobody[0] who can give you anything for the voucher except for a can of corn. [0] Yes, someone might be willing to buy up vouchers if they wanted a LOT of cans of corn, but the logistics and difficulty of converting that to real cash means that it's not going to scale. It might surge during crisis events, where the cash price of a staple suddenly skyrocketed, but a voucher denominated in grams/litres/bushels held value.
saintkaye 3y ago
To be fair, we tried it when people had money on insert any crypto exchange name The results weren’t great.
- erikig 3y ago
  This also reminded me of the “Aaand it’s gone” meme from South Park https://youtu.be/jEBnrzNuUSA https://youtu.be/jEBnrzNuUSA
swader999 3y ago
Options?
- bogoris 3y ago
  [dead]
Throwfi44 3y ago
Money do expire! There is inflation... I would like similar system for land ownership and buildings. Property taxes at level of 5%. In China land can not be owned, but only leased for 70 years.
- thicknavyrain 3y ago
  It's remarkable how many problems seemingly come back to Land Value Taxation.
  - ysofunny 3y ago
    maybe the only real technical problem is "whose is that?"
    - scotty79 3y ago
      If nobody is to he found to tax then you can just take the land. Super lax version of use it or loose it
- genman 3y ago
  Actually no. Expiration of money and inflation can exist simultaneously. Expiration of money is an end of life cycle event of individual bills - it affects certain lump sum of money that will become void in corpore. The nominal value of the money will remain the same. Inflation is continuous devaluation of nominal value of all the money regardless of individual bills. If we discuss expiration of money then we should consider what constitutes as money creation - when will the countdown start. Is the money created when it is issued by a (central) bank or is created when an exchange (for value) takes place? With the first idea a single transaction can contain money with multiple expiration dates and as such the money with longer expiration date will immediately become more valuable and the nominal value of the money is not universal anymore. The second approach avoids this problem - the nominal value of the transaction is always the same. This has an other interesting side effect as it would incentive to make transactions legal. But what Gesell describes is mandatory deflation of value of money by insisting a tax on money - a monetary money holder tax, kind of. Whoever holds the money is obliged to pay the tax - if you put your money into bank then it would be the bank. So his idea is considerably different.
cpursley 3y ago
It does, it's called inflation.
- terminous 3y ago
  So you came to this thread and saw this comment made 18 minutes before yours, with replies to that comment, and just reposted the same irrelevant, dismissive, low-effort comment? Did you think it needed to be said twice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294857 On an unrelated note, HN rules forbid me from implying that a commenter has not read the article.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    I originally opened the article and didn't and comment until later. Real time messages would solve that.
demondemidi 3y ago
the number if plays it takes to game this out is making my head creak. my paycheck expires in a week so i have to spend it immediately on food and utilities. i have no job security so i'm always terrified. but everyone has to spend their money asap so job security is increased. however there aren't enough people to service all of the needs because savings would have created a buffer if it existed, but now we have too much demand and way too little supply. so people start stealing and killing from each other and the whole world descends into chaos. let me go prompt DeathByAi.gg with this scenario.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Even normal money expires via something other than inflation. I have a bunch of CHF that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank now. No idea if I’ll ever be able to do that.
- t8sr 3y ago
  This might not help you if you’re outside the country, but I believe the railway ticket office and the post office will also accept them. An anecdote: few months ago, my partner actually exchanged a 100 CHF note in the big SNB building on Bürkliplatz, and it’s essentially a Jason Bourne scene (although that wasn’t really Zurich in the movie). You walk in, a guy speaking with a stereotypical Bünzli accent takes your name, then brings you individually into an office where you can hand your gross old bank note to a man wearing a suit. Next to arguing about chess in German over a beer on the train, this is the most Swiss experience available. EDIT: Maybe more to the point, like everything else in Switzerland, apparently you can resolve this by sending a registered letter. In this case, if you mail them the banknotes at the Cashier’s office in Bern, along with your account information, they will wire you the money.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    Note that there's a phase even beyond that where the notes are completely unredeemable. At a numismatics fair, I saw a 10 CHF note in a stack priced at 4 USD, and thought "Woo! Free money!" However, it was a 5th series note, which were fully demonetized in 2000.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    I’m not in Switzerland or even Europe, however. I just have some cash left over from when I closed an account in 2011, actually, it’s around 5K or so. When they retired the currency, they only now allow exchanges at the Swiss national bank. I didn’t hear that I could do it by mail, will check that out. Otherwise a family vacation to Bern might be nice.
matt3210 3y ago
If money expired ID be living lavishly instead of in an RV and hoarding cash
newscracker 3y ago
Inflation, negative interest rates and the impending introduction of CBDCs (which will bring along more purpose limited and expiring vouchers too) all cause or will cause money to expire. In other words, these are tools to prod people to spend now or invest somewhere now to keep the consumption economy going. Depending on the country and other events, entire fiat currencies or specific denominations of fiat currencies can expire and become color paper worth almost nothing. We’ve seen this many times over the last several decades that fiat currency (not backed by gold or other physical asset) has existed. It’s all about trust from every angle and every motive.
TheBlight 3y ago
We can be sure when CBCDs come into existence they will feature demurrage of some form.
agumonkey 3y ago
And how much of adult life is the derivative logic of expirations.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
There should be an expiration sort of penalty for every KYCed account larger than a 0.0000x% of GDP. Current, savings, brokerage, insurance or whatever. Beyond a certain amount of wealth and cash in the bank people and institutions stop thinking in an entrepreneurial way and start thinking about the economy at large, or predicting the economy at large. And GDP is very much like performance anxiety, when everybody is thinking about that, then it becomes very difficult to get it up. Or you do get it up but it's not nearly as rewarding because it becomes an artificially inflated number without any connection with actual welfare of the population and developement of a country.
jonnycomputer 3y ago
Money is a contract with the state. It expires with the state. Physical paper bills also do wear out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old-dollar-bills-cash-federal-reserve/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old...
- mikewarot 3y ago
  Soft money is a contract with the state, hard money doesn't expire. A $1 silver dollar coin from 1901 is worth a heck of a lot more than a $1 bill from the same time.
  - jonnycomputer 3y ago
    The value of that $1 silver coin is either the market value of the silver, or the sentimental value to collectors. It not functionally money anymore. The notion of "hard money" is a joke.
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
      > The notion of "hard money" is a joke. Why? I don't even think modern Keynesians would argue against commodities this confidently, maybe MMT's would?
      - taliesinb 3y ago
        I guess we should distinguish money from commodities, though? For money to mean something different to commodities, it must enjoy a privileged legal and social role, by virtue of its ability to satisfy tax obligations to the state and debt obligations to other private citizens. I guess the "joke" is that we used to think the value of money derived primarily from its commodity backing. Which was maybe true in some particular historical periods but not true whenever state power was durable, as it is today.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    Hard money can expire, sort of. Hard money is a contract with generalized civilization that only has value so long as civilization continues to organize and complexify our resources. A $1 silver dollar coin still has a lot of objective value because civilization still provides lots of good and useful stuff for us to consume.
jmclnx 3y ago
In a way we kine of have it, it is oil or really energy. And inflation is a factor of energy supply. But if money expired, I think people would go back to Gold and Silver as a base of wealth with "money" being worthless.
OscarCunningham 3y ago
The article is just making stuff up here: > Total U.S. bank deposits are around $17 trillion. Meanwhile, total wealth in this country, including nonmonetary assets, is around $149 trillion, more than 63 times the total available cash. The gaps between these numbers are like dark matter in the universe — we don’t have a way to empirically account for it, and yet without it our understanding of the universe, or the economy, would collapse. There's no reason you would expect these numbers to be the same, and nothing relies on them being the same.
- ruiisnwn 3y ago
  [dead]
Jevon23 3y ago
Complete insanity. Don’t plan for the future. Don’t delay gratification. Never save up enough money that you’re allowed to have a taste of true freedom. Always be precarious, always be dependent on your boss for the next handout, lest your food and shelter be in jeopardy. Don’t step out of line, lest that handout be jeopardized. Keep your hands off my bank account.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  Too late - these ideas have, in a backward sort of way, been implemented in the form of quantitative easing, aka inflating away your savings.
  - taliesinb 3y ago
    QE did not lead to historically high levels of inflation. Most of the money stayed in the financial sector, on banks balance sheets.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  >Keep your hands off my bank account. Your bank account balance is of little importance with a fiat currency. Banks themselves are superfluous now that money does not have to be represented by cash and thus needs no vault. Maybe you mean “Keep your hands off the purchasing power of the currency in my bank account”.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  "Your" bank account? Only so long as you don't step out of line or say the wrong thing. Access to "your" money is a privilege granted by the state and large corporations you are awarded only so long as you are making money for they system. What you seem to be upset about is EXACTLY the system we have now. Roughly, state backed currencies seem to inflate by about an order of magnitude each generation, a nickle 40 years ago will buy what $.50 buys today. When I was a kid, soda was $0.25, now $2.50 for a bottle of pop is not uncommon, state money does expire and whats in your bank account can be taken away anytime. Thank god we've had a solution to this problem for over a decade now but it might take another decade still for normal average people to catch on, I'm still surprised the HN crowd is so far behind in this regard :(
znpy 3y ago
Who would this hurt, anyway? Rich people keep their “money” in the form of socks, bonds and properties anyway.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  I always think things like this are amusing: Poor people “failing” the Marshmallow Test is taken as not having impulse control — but I’d argue studies fail to account for different life experience in people taking your “marshmallow” away, no matter what they promise. This is stealing marshmallows on an industrial scale.
  - bogoris 3y ago
    [dead]
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    Absolutely spot on. When someone is used to an unsafe environment, eating the marshmallow immediately is a perfectly rational behavior.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Why do you want it to hurt someone? The real question is, who would this help? It doesn't appear that it would help anyone, it would turn money into breadline vouchers and enable the powerful to enslave us all.
Zigurd 3y ago
Might be the wrong question. Humans expire. Inheritance taxes, and shorter copyright expiration would solve many of the same problems that expiring money claims to address. As many others have noted, inflation already is a strong disincentive for hoarding money.
outside1234 3y ago
People would buy gold or other money We don't want that
- latchkey 3y ago
  This is honestly the winning comment. Water flows through the path of least resistance.
al_be_back 3y ago
Unless you go back to Bartering, Money can't expire, but currency can, such as when an Empire/Country/Political union collapses/arises, new currencies appear. A more recent case being the Euro currency - many EU countries dropped their currency, for Euro. In the process there were losses and gains, since there may not be cross-market consensus in value-conversion. For instance, Real Estate may suddenly be more expensive, likewise groceries, but salaries stay the same. What you could do though (i'm not an economist) is to periodically introduce Monetary and Fiscal Policies that reset/adjust the economy (outside a government's influence e.g. Central Bank + Supreme Court).
Geee 3y ago
Insanely bad idea. People will always try to store their wealth in inperishable goods. People will get rid of their perishable money and buy property. Which is what happens now already, because of inflation. When property becomes a "money" in a store of value sense, it will become overvalued, and people can't afford houses for living anymore.
- gspencley 3y ago
  > People will always try to store their wealth in inperishable goods. Exactly this. This is how money came to be, "organically", in the first place. Because of modern fiat currency people tend to think that money is some sort of invention, but it doesn't take much to realize that if you're a dairy farmer then barter is completely untenable. How do you save and store enough milk to buy a car, and who has a car for sale and wants to trade it for a ton of milk anyway? Throughout history everything from salt to spices to metals has been used as currency. There are 5 properties that make for a good currency: - Easily divisible - Relatively light weight / easy to store - Difficult to counterfeit / fake - Other people are highly willing to trade for it (high market value) - Durable / non-perishable You need all of the above, which is why precious metals became so common. If fiat currency "expired" then people would just replace it with something that satisfies durable / non-perishable.
- LouisSayers 3y ago
  > People will get rid of their perishable money and buy property Which has rates to pay - assuming the market stands still that property is actually a liability. Storing money in gold is probably a better example, until we find a way to cheaply create it...
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I feel like homes should not be taxed, or at least the first $X dollars of your first home should not be.
  - verall 3y ago
    This is the case in most places I know of, it's called a homestead exemption.
knorker 3y ago
And with going off the gold standard, it came to pass. Right? Even his percentage of cost to hoarding money is in the ballpark of current inflation. This was written in a time before inflation, where hoarding cash was not stupid. Today it is. We don't need the incentive to increase the velocity of money. Well, I say that, but too many people just have their savings in a cash account. Sometimes not even a saving account, but an account with no interest at all. But then again that just means that the bank invests it in one way or another. Short of physical cash, there's not really any way to keep money being "unused".
motohagiography 3y ago
The whole point of money was to last longer than the expiring and perishable things it was used to pay for. The purchasing power of a dollar in the last century is about 1/500th of what it was when it was paid for the value someone created back then. If money expires/inflates, people use it to buy something to hedge it, which creates a bubble in that asset. The real estate bubble created by low interest rates is exactly what happens to everything else in an inflationary environment. Hedges include gold and metals, land, art and alternative assets, or like Wiemar [0], people just spend devalued money on gambling and prostitution. If history is any indicator of what happens when you debase a currency, I'd say the best hedges are a second passport and ammo. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture#Berlin's_reputation_for_decadence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture#Berlin's_reputa...
- haolez 3y ago
  That's a very good way of explaining this. Here in Brazil the previous generations have a golden rule that you must store value in land, not in money. And Brazil has had tons of inflation and weak currencies in the last decades (with all the poverty and stagnation that it brings).
  - gumby 3y ago
    Land can expire. IIRC back in the late 60s and 70s Singapore had, and may still have, a law requiring purchased land to be developed within 7 years else the government would auction it off. The same effect is why many economists believe that a bit of inflation is important (this argument is different from the widely held central bank theory that an inflation target of ~2% is better than 0)
    - temporarara 3y ago
      If you buy forest or agricultural land you are pretty safe. The worst thing that can happen in civilized places is that a big entity forcefully buys it away from you for "reasons" and you don't get as much profit as you would like, but nonetheless then you can just buy more land somewhere else. Owning developed land is just a liability in many places since you've got to pay taxes and all kind of annual fees. It's business at that point and not just owning land (your business instincts don't have to be nearly as good when dealing with forest and agricultural land).
uwagar 3y ago
i took 'paper' 20 quid note from i think 2015 to an exchange here in this asian country to turn it into $ and was told no 'sir' we dont take this note anymore, only 'plastic' 20 quid note. my 20 quid note was valueless right here. of course i suppose i could go back to london and exchange it for a plastic 20 quid note. just saying.
latchkey 3y ago
A couple other recent blog posts on the topic: https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-i https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-p... https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-ii https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-p...
throwaway81523 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)
LinuxBender 3y ago
If money expired I would invest in freeze dried foods, fuel and land. What remains would be added as credit in utility services. Most businesses beyond that would never see a penny of my money.
pelorat 3y ago
In some places in Europe, like Sweden, when new bills are released, and if you don't get your old exchanged they will soon enough become worthless. So don't stuff cash in your matress or you'll lose it eventually.
- PopAlongKid 3y ago
  Not that different in U.S. The older bills without modern anti-counterfeiting (colored threads, holograms, etc) already attract increased scrutiny (not exactly worthless, but heading in the same direction). I recently went to an In-N-Out with a $50 bill from around the turn of the century, and a manager had to be called over to inspect it.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    That's very different, it was inspected but you could still use it...? It was not invalid.
    - PopAlongKid 3y ago
      That's why I wrote "not exactly worthless, but heading in the same direction".
- Too 3y ago
  That's more a technicality of the carrier. There's nothing lost in the value, you just have to replace them with newer version. Any sane country would do this if old bills turn out to be easily forged.
deleted 3y ago
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captn3m0 3y ago
There’s 2 interesting implementations of money that do expire: 1. GNU Taler (going live next year I think?) has expiry attached to all signed tokens, to prevent the tokens (really EUR tokens signed by an issuing licensed entity, not blockchain/crypto bullshit) to promote it as a payment instrument instead of an investment. 2. CBDC does offer expiry as one axis. The Indian implementation, which is very early, has very little adoption is extended from e-RUPI which is a purpose delimited voucher-based money, primarily meant for social welfare schemes. I’m not 100% certain but this includes inbuilt expiry.
chaostheory 3y ago
We already have inflation, but if governments want this then it’s possible via CBDCs
Tommstein 3y ago
A portion of it is effectively always expiring: it's called inflation.
RecycledEle 3y ago
In America in 2023, everything is corruption. First, the wealthy would agree to complicated contracts with each other so they trade back and forth to avoid ever letting their money expire. Then my landlord would sneak into my home and swap my new money for her about-to-expire money. Then my employer would pay me with about-to-expire money by lying and saying they paid me that money long ago, and offer to pay me in fresh money if I worked a lot more hours and accepted a lower wage. I's still be where I am, unable to gather enough weapons grade material to get even with The System.
RiOuseR 3y ago
[dead]
owlstuffing 3y ago
Fiat money already DOES expire. It’s called INFLATION. If you put all your investments in a savings account in 2008, your “money” would smell like a compost pit.
- CivilWart 3y ago
  Inflationary expiration is not guaranteed though. Deflation is always a possibility.
  - owlstuffing 3y ago
    Historically, inflation dominates and ultimately collapses fiat currency.
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    Yes it is. At least in the US. It's literally the feds directive to make sure inflation happens at a steady rate.
chrisbrandow 3y ago
It feels like there's a "Congratulations, you just re-invented the inheritance tax!" joke in here. But all snark aside, I think this is part in parcel with the general observation that money as a stored good has mostly negative impacts beyond some amount amount proportional to single digit multipliers of median annual income.
randomname93857 3y ago
I see, crooks look for new venues to rob people of hard earned money?
MongoTheMad 3y ago
I already live in a world where money can expire in 60 to 120 days. It's called a check, and hardly anybody accepts them anymore.
ZeljkoS 3y ago
But the money does expire, it is called inflation! Mainstream economist think inflation is good and recommend 1-3% for a healty economy. And inflation is more practical to implement than putting date stamps on the back of bills like the original idea in the article.
bobse 3y ago
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seydor 3y ago
Inflation is a good implementation of this. The period of high inflation circa '70s was also the most equal economy of the recent decades. It's all been downhill from there
LanceH 3y ago
If I were looking for a way to put myself under the thumb of some authority, great.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Kacidoo 3y ago
[flagged]
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
theodric 3y ago
Money does expire: it's called inflation
6510 3y ago
I believe my similar idea to be more funny. Government mints a currency that can be used to pay taxes (for example 2024) It uses the currency to buy products and services from the private sector. It will have a flexible exchange rate. You anticipate how much taxes you will have to pay and try to buy the currency cheaper than using the conventional coins. A forex market will happen based on economic activity, how much collective tax there will have to be paid. If there is a crisis there is likely to be more of the currency in circulation than the total sum of 2025 taxes. After the final tax day the currency is worthless.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
So much wrong in this article. First, barter does not outdate money, contrary to popular wisdom. Money is always the most difficult to produce or procure, most long lasting, widely saleable good. No matter what system you start with, it will evolve into these characteristics because that's what problem solving humans want because it benefits them. Money is, among other things, a tool to transfer capital temporally. Saving it is tranfering capital you created today into the future. Borrowing it is transferring capital you will create in the future to today, at a cost that benefits a facilitator. Financially this is equivalent to shorting the present or shorting the future, or going long on the future with leverage, if you borrow for investment purposes. Creating a type of money that can only do this in one direction, that is, borrowing, is creating a world where we can only take from our futures and not give to our future selves. How you can do that without making the future worse is beyond me, seems impossible to my simple mind. We already have a softer version of this. Money doesn't expire, but it devalues, there's a cost to saving in money, that is higher in the present and near term than the cost to borrow it. So the game is such that the incentive is to borrow. And we see the effects of this, taking from our future, the future looks increasingly bleak because it is a certainty that, at some point in the future, this system will spiral out of control. We have sucked the value out of our future for frivolities today. If you can look at the state of the world and see the impact that our current monetary system has had, and believe that money that expires will be a positive development, I'd love to hear your reasoning.
from-nibly 3y ago
This is just taxes and inflation with different words. The reason the FED targets a certain amount of inflation is literally this. So people will spend their dang money and keep the economy rolling at whatever pace they deem healthy. Your money already expires.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Then everyone would throw it out of the window rather then investing and saving. Is that what we want?
seltzered_ 3y ago
There's another commenter that pointed out the concept of 'demurrage', there's a film about it - see this post on "Shillings from Heaven / Wörgl's Miracle" by Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics: https://grassrootseconomics.org/worgl https://grassrootseconomics.org/worgl
hcfman 3y ago
Then the rich people would find a way so that their money doesn’t expire and the poor and middle class people’s money would expire.
bogoris 3y ago
[dead]

116 points by rlnorthcutt 3y ago

The author finally gets on to their real motivation for writing the piece near the end, where they call for 100% inheritence tax and the abolition of familial solidarity. The expiring money idea, as pointed out by others, is silly and would lead to asset and loan hoarding. But that isn't the point, the author is promoting an ideology that wants to move personal loyalty from the family to the state.

rlnorthcutt 3y ago

An interesting look at theories around "perishable" money. A very interesting concept. Most resources in the world have a lifespan - even an iron bar will eventually rust. However, a dollar is as perpetual as the system itself. On top of that, the entire economic system is designed to reward those who take more and give less - that is how you become rich, and being rich is the highest ideal. However, if money had a lifespan... if it could "decay" just like the crops we grow, then things would change. If you try to sell a bushel of corn today, and there isn't much demand, you will need to lower the price to sell it. This is because it will go bad and then you will have nothing. If you get paid a dollar today, and you know that dollar has a lifespan, then you are incentivized to spend it! If you have a million dollars that can expire, there isn't much use in holding or hoarding it... like the corn, it will go bad. So, you want to spend it - on things you need, or services, or by investing in equipment, training, research,etc. Heck - even just going on a trip or getting a nice meal is better than letting the money "rot" in a bank account. I'm not so sure that something like this would work at scale. It seems to be more workable in smaller circles, like a LETS or local trade system. Still, the thought experiment is useful, and I thnk it helps to highlight how some of the problems we face are actually baked into the system. From the article: 'Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.'

bogantech 3y ago
> A very interesting concept. Most resources in the world have a lifespan - even an iron bar will eventually rust. Gold doesn't though, we'd just end up back at hoarding / investing in gold
garrickvanburen 3y ago
Grain is quite stable under the right conditions (dry, cool), which is one of the reasons there can be a futures market for it and sales can happen over the winter and even the spring following a harvest. It wouldn’t surprise me if the origin of currency began with grain.
- analog31 3y ago
  ... and possibly with futures. A clay tablet promising delivery of grain.
- alsogutalsogut 3y ago
  [flagged]
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Call me cynical but I have a strong feeling that the wealthy elite who are already paying an entire cottage industry's worth of six-figure or more finance professionals and lawyers to dodge taxes will find a way to make this work for them too, while it creates an even stronger barrier to entering the truly monied classes from whatever remains of the middle class. If you want to get money moving in the economy again, we already know how to do that. Tax the shit out of the wealthy in such a way that they can't weasel out of it, and turn that money over to the people, be it through hiring them for public works projects, more and wider spread research grants, Universal Basic Income, or economic stimulus. We have tons of mechanisms to move money "down the hierarchy" as Dr. Peterson would say, but the problem is all of our politicians and media are owned by the very rich, and so taking money from the very rich is not on the table, which is how you do that. So we're left with this entire group of two professionals scratching their heads as to how we solve the problem of "the rich have too much money and the poor don't have enough" without having the rich give the poor money, which rather predictably lands at "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." I'm not even necessarily arguing pro or con here (though if you're curious, I'm extremely pro) I'm just saying that the rich accumulating too much is doing exactly what economists have always said it will do: it stalls the economy, and it will continue to do that. No amount of thumb on the scale by the rich will change this fundamental fact, and even some of them are saying this. If you totally strip mine the consumer base in the never ending pursuit of number-go-up, eventually you have no one left to sell your products to and then the entire game is over.

numtel 3y ago

Uh, our money does already expire. It's called inflation.

abe_m 3y ago
It is interesting how closely the proposals of Gesell are to current US Fed policy of 2% inflation. The main difference seems to be the current system runs on the Cantillion effect, where those in favoured positions (close to where the money is created) benefit from the inflation, while those farthest away bear the cost. In effect, it is the rich who are able to borrow direct from Central Banks and Government Treasuries get negative effective interest, and are able to parlay that into charging more interest to those farther down the chain, until you hit people paying 20+% on credit cards and payday loans. But as far as the perishable money, there are currently places like Turkey and Argentina where inflation is far higher than Gesell's proposed 5% inflation. Are those countries flourishing as a result of local inflation? It doesn't seem that way.
- latchkey 3y ago
  2% is an entirely made up number though. "The 2 percent target widely adopted by central banks today originated from New Zealand, and surprisingly it came not from any academic study, but rather from an offhand comment during a television interview." https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves-2-percent-target-rate-inflation-0 https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves...
- tiredofleftist 3y ago
  Quoting. "those in favoured positions, close to..." Add: "Investment is the production of capital goods, and the production of capital goods involves consumption." and: "Are those countries flourishing as a result of local inflation? It doesn't seem"...so ...Question I have: "This disinflation, i.e. near or almost deflation, been first contested - because some things actually became truly expensiver, but to determine inflation you did not need to calculate it as an average?", i want to ask.
rlnorthcutt 3y ago

pphysch 3y ago

That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial). It's the only reasonable way to implement something like UBI: give everyone X "food credits" and Y "housing credits" each week. There would still be fraud and "credit laundering" to get around the expirations, but the overall waste would be tiny compared to the legacy finance system.

zmgsabst 3y ago
Do you have a study showing EBT cards are more effective and reduce fraud compared to direct cash subsidies?
hakfoo 3y ago
The problem isn't a lack of expiration, so much as it is relying on commercial middlemen. Nationalize the real-estate and you create a monopsony for housing credits. Open up state-run distribution centres that accept the food vouchers, and only redeem them there. The laundering/cashout concept relies on someone qualified to accept the credits and get real money back from the state. Stereotypically, this was a shady bodega or landlord who would fudge the books to claim they had enough sales to cover the vouchers they bought for 20% of face value. Going to direct fulfillment means they fall out of the loop: there's nobody[0] who can give you anything for the voucher except for a can of corn. [0] Yes, someone might be willing to buy up vouchers if they wanted a LOT of cans of corn, but the logistics and difficulty of converting that to real cash means that it's not going to scale. It might surge during crisis events, where the cash price of a staple suddenly skyrocketed, but a voucher denominated in grams/litres/bushels held value.

saintkaye 3y ago

To be fair, we tried it when people had money on insert any crypto exchange name The results weren’t great.

erikig 3y ago
This also reminded me of the “Aaand it’s gone” meme from South Park https://youtu.be/jEBnrzNuUSA https://youtu.be/jEBnrzNuUSA

swader999 3y ago

Options?

bogoris 3y ago
[dead]

Throwfi44 3y ago

Money do expire! There is inflation... I would like similar system for land ownership and buildings. Property taxes at level of 5%. In China land can not be owned, but only leased for 70 years.

thicknavyrain 3y ago
It's remarkable how many problems seemingly come back to Land Value Taxation.
- ysofunny 3y ago
  maybe the only real technical problem is "whose is that?"
  - scotty79 3y ago
    If nobody is to he found to tax then you can just take the land. Super lax version of use it or loose it
genman 3y ago
Actually no. Expiration of money and inflation can exist simultaneously. Expiration of money is an end of life cycle event of individual bills - it affects certain lump sum of money that will become void in corpore. The nominal value of the money will remain the same. Inflation is continuous devaluation of nominal value of all the money regardless of individual bills. If we discuss expiration of money then we should consider what constitutes as money creation - when will the countdown start. Is the money created when it is issued by a (central) bank or is created when an exchange (for value) takes place? With the first idea a single transaction can contain money with multiple expiration dates and as such the money with longer expiration date will immediately become more valuable and the nominal value of the money is not universal anymore. The second approach avoids this problem - the nominal value of the transaction is always the same. This has an other interesting side effect as it would incentive to make transactions legal. But what Gesell describes is mandatory deflation of value of money by insisting a tax on money - a monetary money holder tax, kind of. Whoever holds the money is obliged to pay the tax - if you put your money into bank then it would be the bank. So his idea is considerably different.

cpursley 3y ago

It does, it's called inflation.

terminous 3y ago
So you came to this thread and saw this comment made 18 minutes before yours, with replies to that comment, and just reposted the same irrelevant, dismissive, low-effort comment? Did you think it needed to be said twice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294857 On an unrelated note, HN rules forbid me from implying that a commenter has not read the article.
- cpursley 3y ago
  I originally opened the article and didn't and comment until later. Real time messages would solve that.

demondemidi 3y ago

the number if plays it takes to game this out is making my head creak. my paycheck expires in a week so i have to spend it immediately on food and utilities. i have no job security so i'm always terrified. but everyone has to spend their money asap so job security is increased. however there aren't enough people to service all of the needs because savings would have created a buffer if it existed, but now we have too much demand and way too little supply. so people start stealing and killing from each other and the whole world descends into chaos. let me go prompt DeathByAi.gg with this scenario.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Even normal money expires via something other than inflation. I have a bunch of CHF that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank now. No idea if I’ll ever be able to do that.

t8sr 3y ago
This might not help you if you’re outside the country, but I believe the railway ticket office and the post office will also accept them. An anecdote: few months ago, my partner actually exchanged a 100 CHF note in the big SNB building on Bürkliplatz, and it’s essentially a Jason Bourne scene (although that wasn’t really Zurich in the movie). You walk in, a guy speaking with a stereotypical Bünzli accent takes your name, then brings you individually into an office where you can hand your gross old bank note to a man wearing a suit. Next to arguing about chess in German over a beer on the train, this is the most Swiss experience available. EDIT: Maybe more to the point, like everything else in Switzerland, apparently you can resolve this by sending a registered letter. In this case, if you mail them the banknotes at the Cashier’s office in Bern, along with your account information, they will wire you the money.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  Note that there's a phase even beyond that where the notes are completely unredeemable. At a numismatics fair, I saw a 10 CHF note in a stack priced at 4 USD, and thought "Woo! Free money!" However, it was a 5th series note, which were fully demonetized in 2000.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I’m not in Switzerland or even Europe, however. I just have some cash left over from when I closed an account in 2011, actually, it’s around 5K or so. When they retired the currency, they only now allow exchanges at the Swiss national bank. I didn’t hear that I could do it by mail, will check that out. Otherwise a family vacation to Bern might be nice.

matt3210 3y ago

If money expired ID be living lavishly instead of in an RV and hoarding cash

newscracker 3y ago

Inflation, negative interest rates and the impending introduction of CBDCs (which will bring along more purpose limited and expiring vouchers too) all cause or will cause money to expire. In other words, these are tools to prod people to spend now or invest somewhere now to keep the consumption economy going. Depending on the country and other events, entire fiat currencies or specific denominations of fiat currencies can expire and become color paper worth almost nothing. We’ve seen this many times over the last several decades that fiat currency (not backed by gold or other physical asset) has existed. It’s all about trust from every angle and every motive.

TheBlight 3y ago

We can be sure when CBCDs come into existence they will feature demurrage of some form.

agumonkey 3y ago

And how much of adult life is the derivative logic of expirations.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

There should be an expiration sort of penalty for every KYCed account larger than a 0.0000x% of GDP. Current, savings, brokerage, insurance or whatever. Beyond a certain amount of wealth and cash in the bank people and institutions stop thinking in an entrepreneurial way and start thinking about the economy at large, or predicting the economy at large. And GDP is very much like performance anxiety, when everybody is thinking about that, then it becomes very difficult to get it up. Or you do get it up but it's not nearly as rewarding because it becomes an artificially inflated number without any connection with actual welfare of the population and developement of a country.

jonnycomputer 3y ago

Money is a contract with the state. It expires with the state. Physical paper bills also do wear out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old-dollar-bills-cash-federal-reserve/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old...

mikewarot 3y ago
Soft money is a contract with the state, hard money doesn't expire. A $1 silver dollar coin from 1901 is worth a heck of a lot more than a $1 bill from the same time.
- jonnycomputer 3y ago
  The value of that $1 silver coin is either the market value of the silver, or the sentimental value to collectors. It not functionally money anymore. The notion of "hard money" is a joke.
  - latency-guy2 3y ago
    > The notion of "hard money" is a joke. Why? I don't even think modern Keynesians would argue against commodities this confidently, maybe MMT's would?
    - taliesinb 3y ago
      I guess we should distinguish money from commodities, though? For money to mean something different to commodities, it must enjoy a privileged legal and social role, by virtue of its ability to satisfy tax obligations to the state and debt obligations to other private citizens. I guess the "joke" is that we used to think the value of money derived primarily from its commodity backing. Which was maybe true in some particular historical periods but not true whenever state power was durable, as it is today.
- anonporridge 3y ago
  Hard money can expire, sort of. Hard money is a contract with generalized civilization that only has value so long as civilization continues to organize and complexify our resources. A $1 silver dollar coin still has a lot of objective value because civilization still provides lots of good and useful stuff for us to consume.

jmclnx 3y ago

In a way we kine of have it, it is oil or really energy. And inflation is a factor of energy supply. But if money expired, I think people would go back to Gold and Silver as a base of wealth with "money" being worthless.

OscarCunningham 3y ago

The article is just making stuff up here: > Total U.S. bank deposits are around $17 trillion. Meanwhile, total wealth in this country, including nonmonetary assets, is around $149 trillion, more than 63 times the total available cash. The gaps between these numbers are like dark matter in the universe — we don’t have a way to empirically account for it, and yet without it our understanding of the universe, or the economy, would collapse. There's no reason you would expect these numbers to be the same, and nothing relies on them being the same.

ruiisnwn 3y ago
[dead]

Jevon23 3y ago

Complete insanity. Don’t plan for the future. Don’t delay gratification. Never save up enough money that you’re allowed to have a taste of true freedom. Always be precarious, always be dependent on your boss for the next handout, lest your food and shelter be in jeopardy. Don’t step out of line, lest that handout be jeopardized. Keep your hands off my bank account.

argiopetech 3y ago
Too late - these ideas have, in a backward sort of way, been implemented in the form of quantitative easing, aka inflating away your savings.
- taliesinb 3y ago
  QE did not lead to historically high levels of inflation. Most of the money stayed in the financial sector, on banks balance sheets.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
>Keep your hands off my bank account. Your bank account balance is of little importance with a fiat currency. Banks themselves are superfluous now that money does not have to be represented by cash and thus needs no vault. Maybe you mean “Keep your hands off the purchasing power of the currency in my bank account”.
kylebenzle 3y ago
"Your" bank account? Only so long as you don't step out of line or say the wrong thing. Access to "your" money is a privilege granted by the state and large corporations you are awarded only so long as you are making money for they system. What you seem to be upset about is EXACTLY the system we have now. Roughly, state backed currencies seem to inflate by about an order of magnitude each generation, a nickle 40 years ago will buy what $.50 buys today. When I was a kid, soda was $0.25, now $2.50 for a bottle of pop is not uncommon, state money does expire and whats in your bank account can be taken away anytime. Thank god we've had a solution to this problem for over a decade now but it might take another decade still for normal average people to catch on, I'm still surprised the HN crowd is so far behind in this regard :(

znpy 3y ago

Who would this hurt, anyway? Rich people keep their “money” in the form of socks, bonds and properties anyway.

zmgsabst 3y ago
I always think things like this are amusing: Poor people “failing” the Marshmallow Test is taken as not having impulse control — but I’d argue studies fail to account for different life experience in people taking your “marshmallow” away, no matter what they promise. This is stealing marshmallows on an industrial scale.
- bogoris 3y ago
  [dead]
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Absolutely spot on. When someone is used to an unsafe environment, eating the marshmallow immediately is a perfectly rational behavior.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Why do you want it to hurt someone? The real question is, who would this help? It doesn't appear that it would help anyone, it would turn money into breadline vouchers and enable the powerful to enslave us all.

Zigurd 3y ago

Might be the wrong question. Humans expire. Inheritance taxes, and shorter copyright expiration would solve many of the same problems that expiring money claims to address. As many others have noted, inflation already is a strong disincentive for hoarding money.

outside1234 3y ago

People would buy gold or other money We don't want that

latchkey 3y ago
This is honestly the winning comment. Water flows through the path of least resistance.

al_be_back 3y ago

Unless you go back to Bartering, Money can't expire, but currency can, such as when an Empire/Country/Political union collapses/arises, new currencies appear. A more recent case being the Euro currency - many EU countries dropped their currency, for Euro. In the process there were losses and gains, since there may not be cross-market consensus in value-conversion. For instance, Real Estate may suddenly be more expensive, likewise groceries, but salaries stay the same. What you could do though (i'm not an economist) is to periodically introduce Monetary and Fiscal Policies that reset/adjust the economy (outside a government's influence e.g. Central Bank + Supreme Court).

Geee 3y ago

Insanely bad idea. People will always try to store their wealth in inperishable goods. People will get rid of their perishable money and buy property. Which is what happens now already, because of inflation. When property becomes a "money" in a store of value sense, it will become overvalued, and people can't afford houses for living anymore.

gspencley 3y ago
> People will always try to store their wealth in inperishable goods. Exactly this. This is how money came to be, "organically", in the first place. Because of modern fiat currency people tend to think that money is some sort of invention, but it doesn't take much to realize that if you're a dairy farmer then barter is completely untenable. How do you save and store enough milk to buy a car, and who has a car for sale and wants to trade it for a ton of milk anyway? Throughout history everything from salt to spices to metals has been used as currency. There are 5 properties that make for a good currency: - Easily divisible - Relatively light weight / easy to store - Difficult to counterfeit / fake - Other people are highly willing to trade for it (high market value) - Durable / non-perishable You need all of the above, which is why precious metals became so common. If fiat currency "expired" then people would just replace it with something that satisfies durable / non-perishable.
LouisSayers 3y ago
> People will get rid of their perishable money and buy property Which has rates to pay - assuming the market stands still that property is actually a liability. Storing money in gold is probably a better example, until we find a way to cheaply create it...
janalsncm 3y ago
I feel like homes should not be taxed, or at least the first $X dollars of your first home should not be.
- verall 3y ago
  This is the case in most places I know of, it's called a homestead exemption.

knorker 3y ago

And with going off the gold standard, it came to pass. Right? Even his percentage of cost to hoarding money is in the ballpark of current inflation. This was written in a time before inflation, where hoarding cash was not stupid. Today it is. We don't need the incentive to increase the velocity of money. Well, I say that, but too many people just have their savings in a cash account. Sometimes not even a saving account, but an account with no interest at all. But then again that just means that the bank invests it in one way or another. Short of physical cash, there's not really any way to keep money being "unused".

motohagiography 3y ago

The whole point of money was to last longer than the expiring and perishable things it was used to pay for. The purchasing power of a dollar in the last century is about 1/500th of what it was when it was paid for the value someone created back then. If money expires/inflates, people use it to buy something to hedge it, which creates a bubble in that asset. The real estate bubble created by low interest rates is exactly what happens to everything else in an inflationary environment. Hedges include gold and metals, land, art and alternative assets, or like Wiemar [0], people just spend devalued money on gambling and prostitution. If history is any indicator of what happens when you debase a currency, I'd say the best hedges are a second passport and ammo. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture#Berlin's_reputation_for_decadence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture#Berlin's_reputa...

haolez 3y ago
That's a very good way of explaining this. Here in Brazil the previous generations have a golden rule that you must store value in land, not in money. And Brazil has had tons of inflation and weak currencies in the last decades (with all the poverty and stagnation that it brings).
- gumby 3y ago
  Land can expire. IIRC back in the late 60s and 70s Singapore had, and may still have, a law requiring purchased land to be developed within 7 years else the government would auction it off. The same effect is why many economists believe that a bit of inflation is important (this argument is different from the widely held central bank theory that an inflation target of ~2% is better than 0)
  - temporarara 3y ago
    If you buy forest or agricultural land you are pretty safe. The worst thing that can happen in civilized places is that a big entity forcefully buys it away from you for "reasons" and you don't get as much profit as you would like, but nonetheless then you can just buy more land somewhere else. Owning developed land is just a liability in many places since you've got to pay taxes and all kind of annual fees. It's business at that point and not just owning land (your business instincts don't have to be nearly as good when dealing with forest and agricultural land).

uwagar 3y ago

i took 'paper' 20 quid note from i think 2015 to an exchange here in this asian country to turn it into $ and was told no 'sir' we dont take this note anymore, only 'plastic' 20 quid note. my 20 quid note was valueless right here. of course i suppose i could go back to london and exchange it for a plastic 20 quid note. just saying.

latchkey 3y ago

A couple other recent blog posts on the topic: https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-i https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-p... https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-ii https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-p...

throwaway81523 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)

LinuxBender 3y ago

If money expired I would invest in freeze dried foods, fuel and land. What remains would be added as credit in utility services. Most businesses beyond that would never see a penny of my money.

pelorat 3y ago

In some places in Europe, like Sweden, when new bills are released, and if you don't get your old exchanged they will soon enough become worthless. So don't stuff cash in your matress or you'll lose it eventually.

PopAlongKid 3y ago
Not that different in U.S. The older bills without modern anti-counterfeiting (colored threads, holograms, etc) already attract increased scrutiny (not exactly worthless, but heading in the same direction). I recently went to an In-N-Out with a $50 bill from around the turn of the century, and a manager had to be called over to inspect it.
- KomoD 3y ago
  That's very different, it was inspected but you could still use it...? It was not invalid.
  - PopAlongKid 3y ago
    That's why I wrote "not exactly worthless, but heading in the same direction".
Too 3y ago
That's more a technicality of the carrier. There's nothing lost in the value, you just have to replace them with newer version. Any sane country would do this if old bills turn out to be easily forged.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

captn3m0 3y ago

There’s 2 interesting implementations of money that do expire: 1. GNU Taler (going live next year I think?) has expiry attached to all signed tokens, to prevent the tokens (really EUR tokens signed by an issuing licensed entity, not blockchain/crypto bullshit) to promote it as a payment instrument instead of an investment. 2. CBDC does offer expiry as one axis. The Indian implementation, which is very early, has very little adoption is extended from e-RUPI which is a purpose delimited voucher-based money, primarily meant for social welfare schemes. I’m not 100% certain but this includes inbuilt expiry.

chaostheory 3y ago

We already have inflation, but if governments want this then it’s possible via CBDCs

Tommstein 3y ago

A portion of it is effectively always expiring: it's called inflation.

RecycledEle 3y ago

In America in 2023, everything is corruption. First, the wealthy would agree to complicated contracts with each other so they trade back and forth to avoid ever letting their money expire. Then my landlord would sneak into my home and swap my new money for her about-to-expire money. Then my employer would pay me with about-to-expire money by lying and saying they paid me that money long ago, and offer to pay me in fresh money if I worked a lot more hours and accepted a lower wage. I's still be where I am, unable to gather enough weapons grade material to get even with The System.

RiOuseR 3y ago

[dead]

owlstuffing 3y ago

Fiat money already DOES expire. It’s called INFLATION. If you put all your investments in a savings account in 2008, your “money” would smell like a compost pit.

CivilWart 3y ago
Inflationary expiration is not guaranteed though. Deflation is always a possibility.
- owlstuffing 3y ago
  Historically, inflation dominates and ultimately collapses fiat currency.
- from-nibly 3y ago
  Yes it is. At least in the US. It's literally the feds directive to make sure inflation happens at a steady rate.

chrisbrandow 3y ago

It feels like there's a "Congratulations, you just re-invented the inheritance tax!" joke in here. But all snark aside, I think this is part in parcel with the general observation that money as a stored good has mostly negative impacts beyond some amount amount proportional to single digit multipliers of median annual income.

randomname93857 3y ago

I see, crooks look for new venues to rob people of hard earned money?

MongoTheMad 3y ago

I already live in a world where money can expire in 60 to 120 days. It's called a check, and hardly anybody accepts them anymore.

ZeljkoS 3y ago

But the money does expire, it is called inflation! Mainstream economist think inflation is good and recommend 1-3% for a healty economy. And inflation is more practical to implement than putting date stamps on the back of bills like the original idea in the article.

bobse 3y ago

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seydor 3y ago

Inflation is a good implementation of this. The period of high inflation circa '70s was also the most equal economy of the recent decades. It's all been downhill from there

LanceH 3y ago

If I were looking for a way to put myself under the thumb of some authority, great.

deleted 3y ago

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Kacidoo 3y ago

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Proven 3y ago

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theodric 3y ago

Money does expire: it's called inflation

6510 3y ago

I believe my similar idea to be more funny. Government mints a currency that can be used to pay taxes (for example 2024) It uses the currency to buy products and services from the private sector. It will have a flexible exchange rate. You anticipate how much taxes you will have to pay and try to buy the currency cheaper than using the conventional coins. A forex market will happen based on economic activity, how much collective tax there will have to be paid. If there is a crisis there is likely to be more of the currency in circulation than the total sum of 2025 taxes. After the final tax day the currency is worthless.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

So much wrong in this article. First, barter does not outdate money, contrary to popular wisdom. Money is always the most difficult to produce or procure, most long lasting, widely saleable good. No matter what system you start with, it will evolve into these characteristics because that's what problem solving humans want because it benefits them. Money is, among other things, a tool to transfer capital temporally. Saving it is tranfering capital you created today into the future. Borrowing it is transferring capital you will create in the future to today, at a cost that benefits a facilitator. Financially this is equivalent to shorting the present or shorting the future, or going long on the future with leverage, if you borrow for investment purposes. Creating a type of money that can only do this in one direction, that is, borrowing, is creating a world where we can only take from our futures and not give to our future selves. How you can do that without making the future worse is beyond me, seems impossible to my simple mind. We already have a softer version of this. Money doesn't expire, but it devalues, there's a cost to saving in money, that is higher in the present and near term than the cost to borrow it. So the game is such that the incentive is to borrow. And we see the effects of this, taking from our future, the future looks increasingly bleak because it is a certainty that, at some point in the future, this system will spiral out of control. We have sucked the value out of our future for frivolities today. If you can look at the state of the world and see the impact that our current monetary system has had, and believe that money that expires will be a positive development, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

from-nibly 3y ago

This is just taxes and inflation with different words. The reason the FED targets a certain amount of inflation is literally this. So people will spend their dang money and keep the economy rolling at whatever pace they deem healthy. Your money already expires.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Then everyone would throw it out of the window rather then investing and saving. Is that what we want?

seltzered_ 3y ago

There's another commenter that pointed out the concept of 'demurrage', there's a film about it - see this post on "Shillings from Heaven / Wörgl's Miracle" by Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics: https://grassrootseconomics.org/worgl https://grassrootseconomics.org/worgl

hcfman 3y ago

Then the rich people would find a way so that their money doesn’t expire and the poor and middle class people’s money would expire.

bogoris 3y ago

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