[wpietri]

Your money? It says right on them that they're United States Dollars.

Jokes aside, the rules of property are set up by society to encourage certain jointly beneficial outcomes. Money itself is an inherently social construct. (Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used.) And we are all temporary beings, here a little while and gone. Yes, some of the rules designate some of the property as yours to dispose of for the duration. Which is great! But make no mistake that these rules are contingent.

If tomorrow I hacked all the banks and land registries so I owned everything, people wouldn't say, "Well, I guess that's how it is now." The same is true if I did it technically within the rules. Everybody would make new rules. And they'd be right to. In the phrasing of James Carse, the current rules are the finite game, but like all finite games, the rules are generated by what he calls the infinite game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

[user743]

I think if modern life was a boardgame, no one would want to play because the system is too rigged.

To me it's silly to see how much unused land there is in the USA but people aren't allowed to use it because a few people showed up 150 years ago and claimed it for themselves. And when they did they stole it from other people. Now people are just supposed to respect that forever?

[mbrumlow]

> Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used.

Coinbase and other places seem to facilitate private currencies.

[wpietri]

If more than one person is using a currency, it's definitionally a social activity then, and pretty clearly not what I mean by "your own private currency that only you used".