You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust, and that every time you ‘transact’ in money you’re actually expressing your lack of trust in your counterpart’s ability to “make good” on a barter?
>You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust
I disagree. I posit that money was created to establish a fungible, divisble, common store of value for the purpose of facilitating exchange of goods and services of dissimilar value that are not always needed by the counterparty. Without money, the barber would need to pay for his groceries with haircuts. This poses problems if the grocer or farmer does not want or need a haircut. No trust violations needed here - barter is simply more difficult without money, even if there is absolute trust in your counterparty's promise to deliver the goods or services they offer as described.
The “half barter” theory of the origin of money has been refuted — there is no evidence that ‘primitive’ societies use barter and eventually experienced an urge to facilitate transactions by introducing “universal tokens”. Bated is what people habituated to money revert to when money is not available (those famous “cigarette economies” of POW camps) but that’s not the same thing — indeed it’s just indicative of pervasive cognitive bias. Rather, all evidence points towards money arising for the sake of political centralisation: demand that taxes be paid in terms of these tokens and you create scarcity (tax bills due soon! need money!), a way to pay your soldiers (actually, displaced village folk), and a local demand for the tokens you’re paying them with. What do native societies use: mental tallies of favours and goods rendered, because after all our evolutionary environment is small units of fifty or less individuals in a high-trust environment. I suggest you read Debt by David Graeber, of Occupy Wall Street fame.
> You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust,
No, it wasn't. Money was created as a proxy for trading value because of the cumbersome nature of barter. If we have a commonly agreed upon way to exchange value (money), I can paint your house and you can give me money and I can use that money to go buy food or other people's services. The only "trust" in that is the chosen form of money. Hence why state currencies are less trustworthy and something like Bitcoin (which requires no centralized intermediary) is more trustworthy.
That's not really accurate; favors aren't fungible. I can't give you potatoes, and then use that favor to take a cow from your neighbor. You have to keep track of the balance somehow.
True, but in the fifty-or-so individuals in a high-trust environment as has been true for most of our evolutionary history, keeping mental tabs on running totals is really no difficulty at all.
And yet when you send via Bitcoin, you're putting 100% trust in them following through on fulfilling their end of the deal. Only NFTs/smart contracts fix this, but for them to affect things in the real world you either need society or some oracle to use that smart contract as a source of truth.
Which means you have to actually have discernment and encourages the individual to build long-term relationships, not transactional ones.
It's a bit abstract/esoteric, but using something like Bitcoin would re-humanize commerce vs the increasingly transactional nature of the world enabled by fiat/printing.
I disagree. I posit that money was created to establish a fungible, divisble, common store of value for the purpose of facilitating exchange of goods and services of dissimilar value that are not always needed by the counterparty. Without money, the barber would need to pay for his groceries with haircuts. This poses problems if the grocer or farmer does not want or need a haircut. No trust violations needed here - barter is simply more difficult without money, even if there is absolute trust in your counterparty's promise to deliver the goods or services they offer as described.