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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the reference, and I look forward to understanding what you mean by myth.

Barter is literally my life. I teach other people’s children about life and Computer Science in order to buy potatoes. The children’s parents make medicine and build houses to pay for their children’s education. Is your point that barter is about goods, whereas most people provide services (time, labour?)

Or perhaps you mean that the majority of the economy in terms of wealth is engaged in the investment of capital, and we potato eaters are but a percentage of a percentage?

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With barter is meant (in the context of Graeber's book) trading tit for tat, without having a currency to go between. E.g. a farmer buying a book and paying with apples.

The book says that this barter method is almost never used, and instead people tend to keep track of favors and things they owe in a more vague way. And every now and then, these debts are settled in a communal fashion. But barter is not used.

So the farmer just asks for the book and gets it. And when autumn comes, and the bookstore owner feels like having an apple, he just goes to the farmer and asks for some. But the two transactions are not really linked.

Right. I feel like that’s nit picking (your parent; not you.)

Of course I (teacher) don’t buy potatoes by teaching the farmer’s children Dijkstra.

Instead of bartering we chooses to track our debts. Using Bitcoin as a cryptographically secure distributed debt tracker sounds great.

But Bitcoin right now feels like a bunch of technology enthusiasts have blessed the world with such a debt tracker while also saying ”btw you collectively owe us $630,000,000,000 worth of stuff”.

Also, this digital debt tracker uses numbers, which most of these communal debt systems do not do. Because different people put different value to things, tracking debt in numbers is not how it is done (the book goes in a lot of detail how this works). This is what makes bitcoin a currency, a way to track debts rather than having them implicit.

I'm not sure where on the globe you are at, but where I am from, groups of friends buy rounds of beers at the bar. You do not keep track of whose turn it is to pay the round or whether someone is buying more expensive stuff, but since you are friends you make sure things are fair over time. But implicitly, not tracking numbers and accounts.

And Graeber argues that that is actually the method that predates currency. Not barter.

I fully agree on the hilariously large "primordial" debt we somehow owe the early miners.

Bitcoin does not track debt, it tracks Bitcoin assets.

I'm not sure it's relevant, although the book is fantastic.

The first few chapters show that historically money predates barter, not the other way around. And that money was born as "I owe you" notes issued by the government.

I know of only one comment [1] Graeber made about bitcoin, and it's too late to ask him now.

[1]: https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/990857460176089088

Thanks you expressed it much better than I did.

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