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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the part about the expiration date. Say, you got your free money from the town with an expiration date Dec 31. Awesome, you better spend it quickly, because it's already Dec 30 (say).

But then, who is going to accept your money? If you're the local baker, why would you take my money for the bread you made, knowing perfectly well that you're probably never going to get the chance to spend it?

Doing business on Dec 30 or even Dec 31 is the extreme case, but even before that it's an issue: the closer you get to the expiration date of the money, the higher the risk you're taking that you might not be able to spend it in time.

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The answer is in the article although the author disparages it: People were able to pay their taxes in Worgl. In effect, people didn't have "free money" so much as they had a tax break. They collected Worgl to offset their taxes while hoarding real money. There is no miracle here.

The article says it goes down in value by 10%, not 100%.

Okay, thanks, I did read that but it slipped my mind. Still, though, that makes it a little less bad but doesn't invalidate my argument completely, does it?

What’s the problem? Prices tick up over the course of the year. That already happens with regular money and we call it inflation.

I think demurrage works when money loses value gradually, everyone who accepts it should spend it before it loses value and it increases money velocity.

It is also why people don’t understand why mild inflation can be good

Neither inflation nor demurrage can stop people from saving. They can simply exchange their constantly shrinking money to some good of lasting value. If the problem is lack of liquidity, helicopter money will do, everything else is a needless complication.

"Good of lasting value" doesn't exist in reality. If you use gold then it doesn't change the fact that you are using it as a token representation for human labor. It's just a fancy way of representing a balance sheet.

If gold was a store of value, then it would allow you to travel backwards in time, since the gold used to buy and sell a car today, could be used to buy and sell a car during the time of the Roman empire. In fact the entire concept of time simply wouldn't exist.

All "store of value"s therefore are either the result of fair negotiations in which case their supply would be bounded or they are the result of artificial interventions which will collapse over the long term.

After all, feudalism didn't last forever, so using land as a store of value doesn't work either.

I must admit, I have trouble making any sense of your argument. Are you saying it is not possible to store value? If so, I would disagree. If you wish to go back to Roman times, perhaps look at the history of Roman coinage. One way people used to combat the Roman currency devaluation was to hoard the older coins. Were you to sumble upon a chest of gold from Roman times, you would be rich today, just as the person that buried it. Gold has evidently maintained value over thousands of years, whereas currency from 100 years ago has lost 99% of its purchasing power. In the long term, we are all dead.

You're likely able to sell that chest in the form of Roman currency for much more than if you melted it into a solid gold bar.

Mild inflation is not good for anyone bar the central banks. Central banks profit from inflation (they can pocket this hidden tax) so they repeat the lie that it is good.

People still conduct business at 2,5% inflation. Why would they stop at 0%? People conduct business in deflation too.

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