[est31]

As long as we live in a society of humans, there will be humans controlling millions of dollars, billions, trillions, and then yes, -illion dollar conversations do happen, sometimes randomly even. That's one of the purposes of all the country clubs, yacht clubs, galas, etc.

Business people spend their entire day talking about their business, that's literally their job. Sometimes business opportunities come from random discussions. Sometimes they are more like arranged marriages. And just like with marriages, the story that is told to the public might not be the actual story.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'd like to think humanity will eventually obsolete money in favor of something a bit more flexible. It's kind of a clumsy tool.

[alwa]

What do you imagine, directionally speaking, as a more elegant tool?

I’m understanding your comment to suggest that you find money a clumsy tool for the purpose of allocating human effort and capital… I hope and suspect you have something broader and more elegant in mind than “money, but digital”!

For some reason Doctorow and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind: https://craphound.com/down/download/

[__MatrixMan__]

The deficiencies I'd like to address are:

1. Money will communicate demand to continue, but not demand to stop. Until a profitable but harmful behavior is made illegal there's aren't many ways to stop it even if there's widespread consensus that it should be stopped.

2. It carries no metadata about its history. This means that when I accept a dollar from my employer I don't know what kind of behavior I'm acting in support of. If it's benign, the scarcity dynamics work ok and I should just take it because now I have a scarce thing to trade. But if it was issued to a mining company as part of a loan in support of some operation that's poisoning my drinking water, I'm better off refusing it and telling my employer to find me some cleaner money, otherwise I'm participating in my own demise.

Or maybe that's the same deficiency stated twice, I'm not sure.

I don't think blockchains are the right data structure so there's not much prior art to build on--but yes I do think money's successor will be modulated by software in some way--money being an information technology in the first place.

Lately when I take a crack at it it looks like a CRDT that stores debts and helps people find loops such that those debts can be nullified. If Alice owes Bob one and Bob owes Charlie one and Charlie owes Alice one, then the records of these debts can be purged without needing to settle in some far off clearing house or blockchain (supposing Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all on the same network partition). This buys you partition tolerance, which I think lends itself to something a little more difficult to use for exploiting people who don't know you.

There would be this lattice of trust relationships so you couldn't just waltz in to a poor village where nobody trusted you and expect to wield your foreign wallet to make the locals treat you like a god. If want something to "spend" with a remote population it would be based on some kind of proof you've done something that benefits them.

Mostly I'm just working on the software primitives you'd need, I'm not especially good at the degree of community-mindedness you'd need to do a good job with such a design. But when the time comes I hope to have helped provide the right person with the tools they need.

The only point I wish to make here is that for millennia we had to deal with whatever system the laws of physics handed us (the scarcity of gold and other substances was sufficient to build an economy around) but now we can write our own rules. Maybe it'll take us a few decades or centuries to kick the habit of thinking in the old way, but now that we have options... Well it seems unlikely to me that we wouldn't explore them, instead favoring Caesar's original design.

[meiraleal]

> What do you imagine, directionally speaking, as a more elegant tool?

Joints

but seriously. We have enough to provide to all living people on earth. We do not need to work all day every day to consume. It is possible to create a society optimized for enjoyment where every living person has enough to have a fulfilling life.

We don't need to replace money, we need to make it less important. Something similar to 1 person, 1 vote that made modern democracies possible.