[__MatrixMan__]

I like the technical stuff here.

I'm not so sure about this:

> money is core societal infrastructure, like the power grid and transportation systems are. It would be really bad if hackers working for a foreign government could just turn off money.

Sure, it would be inconvenient in the short term. But I think the current design is holding us back.

I suspect that most of us would have more to gain than to lose if we managed to shut off money-as-we-know-it and keep it off for long enough to iterate on alternatives. Any design that even tried to step beyond "well that's how we've always done it" would likely land somewhere better than what we're doing. Much has changed since Alexander Hamilton.

[Joker_vD]

In the early 90's Russia, essentially, voided almost all of the Soviet money that remained in monetary system (most of which were bank deposits; they simply vanished with zero compensation), allowing rather small upper limit on the amount of old Soviet roubles one person was allowed to exchange for the new Russian roubles.

Believe it or not, that really did not help the low and low-middle classes with their growing financial problems; and the upper-middle and top classes mostly operated in dollars (or less often, in deutschmarks) by this time anyhow, so that didn't inconvenience them much at all.

[__MatrixMan__]

Losing access to one currency but not others is quite a different thing, I don't think that would help anybody.

What I think would help is something that evolved in a less stable computing environment. Something which had to be partition tolerant. Such a thing would have to remain more closely coupled with the consent and merits of its participants because it would lack a reliable connection to a far away authority (currently used to uphold the wishes of extraneous parties to the transaction). Something like local-first software, but for money.

[gadders]

In the short term people would probably starve to death.

[Joker_vD]

Probably not. A competent government could install temporary rationing for the most essential goods such as food. It happened through the the whole of the 1917—1920 Russian revolution, with four or five kinds of paper money being circulated around, and the urban population managed through it only if barely. That government was much less competent than the US government is today.

[mminer237]

I mean, millions still starved during the revolution, even with the American Relief Administration feeding 10% of the country.

[Joker_vD]

In the rural areas, mind you. That's one of the most appalling thing about famines in the XIX-XX, that they hit the countryside heavier than they hit the cities.

[imtringued]

I agree there needs to be more competition, but that doesn't mean you need to get rid of the old way. It is better when two approaches run in parallel, to compensate the other's shortcomings.

[__MatrixMan__]

That would indeed be ideal: one as a backup for the other, and when both are functioning, chose the one that suits you best. I just think that it's outages that will convince us that we need this... stakeholders in the status quo certainly aren't going to do it.

[vel0city]

The uber-wealthy don't have most of their assets in currency. Its in stocks, houses, cars, boats, etc. Delete the dollars, it'll hurt them a bit, but in the end they still have a house(es).

But now all those people who were using currency to trade for housing now suddenly need to find a new way to trade for shelter.

Who got hurt worse here?

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm not going to try to lay down the exact parameters of what we'd come up with in money's place, but if it's going to be resilient in the face of far-away servers behaving badly then it would have to derive it's legitimacy not from some shiny golden ledger of who owns which dollar, house, or car, but instead from who is behaving in a way that benefits the people around them.

So yeah, it could go as you say, but only of the wealthy are behaving in a way that justifies their outsized share while the renters are just spending from a pile of money that they got through less honorable means.

I don't think that's the most likely scenario though.