In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage that spread to many other polities.
As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.
Somalia operated on paper money valued at the cost of producing it
I think it's also the case that hard money is a different kind of phenomenon from paper money reflecting an entirely different philosophy concerning property and what it is. It reflects a natural law perspective in its most earthy and primitive form, which is that gold and silver are money because ancestors from time immemorial saw it as such due to certain intrinsic characteristics. Governments certainly regulated mints, but also marketplaces could and did regulate coinage on their own which is possible because of its physical nature. If a coin is clipped or made into a false alloy, that can be detected and corrected without state institutions.
Paper money by contrast tends to reflect more modern positivist theories of property in which property rights are deemed to exist because the state speaks those rights into existence. In the middle ages and even before, states as we know them now did not exist and could not exist, so positivism would have been absurd on its face, and its most direct application in the form of artificial currency could not be made.
The EIC's first mint was operational in 1643, long before it became a quasi-state. It started to become a quasi-government more than a century later, when it started raising its first major army in the 1750s culminating in the Battle of Plassey and didn't really have the resources to fully become one until the diwani in 1765.
How something comes to be is distinct from how it is used.
Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?
There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.
Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?
Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.
I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.
That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.
And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.
You actually see this on a small scale today in the functioning of many small communities, eg. you don't actually exchange currency to pay the host of a party, but you are expected to reciprocate and host sometimes yourself if you want to keep getting invited. There's a surprisingly large amount of these unpaid micro-transactions that happen, eg. my wife has gotten free childcare, free advice, free (used) furniture, free baby clothes, etc, all in the heart of Silicon Valley, because she reciprocates and also gives away her old furniture, baby toys, baby clothes, advice, introductions, childcare, etc. But when we have to pay the contractor for work on our house, we need dollars. When we buy a computer, we need dollars. When we buy all those goods that we give away new, we need dollars. That again reinforces the "credit is for people you know, currency is for people you don't" distinction.
Barter is used when a previous currency system collapses. The currency is no longer guaranteed to be accepted, so people want hard goods that they know they can use. But barter is an unstable equilibrium: as you mentioned, currency is just barter where one particular good becomes so widely accepted that people will take it not because they want it, but because it can be traded for other things that they want. There are reports of the Bosnian War [2] that described how alcohol and ammo quickly became pseudo-currencies because they were universally accepted and could easily be traded for what you actually needed.
Graeber isn't wrong, but as an anthropologist he over-indexes on the within-group interactions. There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708431
[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/664716931/How-I-survived-a-y...
I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.
I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.
I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?
Where would that leave us?
Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.
Well I mean technically they are always for credit purposes, even if they are the "default/convenient payment method"? That's part of the advantage, but it's still credit. You get to spend and pay later. It wouldn't be a very good evaluation for credit purposes if it didn't work like credit? Or am I misunderstanding you?
It's just to say that "credit" isn't just about an in vs out group anymore than debt is. Or anymore than "currency" is? I'm not sure how the distinction you make helps clarify that question. The point is why would credit be for people you know, and currency for people you don't? Isn't credit just a particular agreement around said currency?
1. I live in a village. I buy flour on credit from the miller, because I lack funds and they know I'll be able to pay them back after I sell my own textile goods at market.
2. I travel overseas to a store I've never seen before and I will never see again. I transact $100 on my credit-card purely because my debit card won't work for some reason. I leave with the goods, reminding myself to pay off the balance ASAP with funds I already possess when I get back to the hotel and a laptop.
Technically they both involve "credit", but it's not really equivalent. The first case involves a direct relationship in a community, while the second is indirect, a stranger trusting my card-company. In the first, incurring a debt is an intended feature, in the second the temporary debt is just a weird inconvenient quirk that I'd rather skip entirely because it makes more work for me.
In short, just because someone uses a credit card doesn't necessarily mean it's "credit" in the anthropological sense.
You said (emphasis added):
> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
So it wasn't about "credit" in the anthropological sense, as credit cards are never used in such a way. Unless you are going to suggest there is some bifurcated way of using credit cards where one offers a more "direct relationship to my community". In short, my misread wasn't as you indicated - about failing to misunderstand something about credit cards. Rather it was conflating a general sense of "credit" (such as credit cards) with what they had meant, "I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts." - which is what you term the "anthropological sense".
So I appreciate the nudge in the right direction, but I hope you see my point given what you actually conveyed. Thanks, have a good day!
Currency vs credit, as it was used some posts up is more like quantifiable vs not quantifiable. It's not about the exact catering expenses of parties thrown ("they had champagne, we have to invite them twice!") it's about inviting or not inviting. Not about the number of hours taking over the children, it's about being there when needed.
I do think that the development of currency is intimately connected with the development of government. The core problem government solves is dispute resolution, and I would bet that the majority of disputes come from transaction where one side does not hold up their end of the bargain. In small communities you just have the tribal elders adjudicate, but as you start doing more currency transactions between mutually-distrusting groups that can't agree on their authority figures, you need a system in place for dispute resolution. Cue states.
My point is simply that currency comes first. State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation. To my knowledge this is historically accurate, and there are a lot of examples of currency spontaneously arising without a state to back it.
Hell, cryptocurrency itself is a good example. We now have a viable transnational, trustless, instantaneous currency. We do not have a viable transnational trustless dispute resolution process. And we very much feel the lack, because crime and fraud is rampant in cryptocurrency transactions. Currency creates the problem that government solves. Creating a government that can go along with cryptocurrency is an unsolved exercise left to the reader.
I mean in the sense of, state formation was of such significance that I don't think you can say something like "currency came first" as if currency prior and post state formation is the same thing. It feels like the same sort of "pseudo-currency" with "currency" equivocation.
So if your model is - basic credit in that communal reciprocative sense, then you start trading with more distant outgroups, for this credit doesn't work, so everyone agrees on a currency, someone off in the distance doesn't agree, then states form to adjudicate disputes.
Then it is sensible as a primitive model, but I would just merely suggest that in the same way trying to say currency comes first is kind of a blurring the meaning of currency perhaps to the point of being a stretch, I think in this case to, it will be less orderly. One way this is blurred almost intrinsically in your articulation is via the term dispute resolution process. This could mean anything. It occurs to me that outright conquest and banditry is one way to resolve a dispute. Perhaps in places were there was "spontaneous" centering around a particular currency, this sort of violence was a predicate. I tend to think the need for violence and domination (and mitigations against the same) - what I think of when I think of states "resolving disputes" - was baked into the germ of humanity much earlier than what we might term "state formation". This gets back to the "pseudo-government" point I was trying to make earlier. I think of these things in parallel, rather than in sequence. If at their core humans are violent, such that they make violence, fear violence, and seek tradeoffs to manage violence, then this violence is a driver across currencies and states and trade networks, regardless of a determination of which "came first", if such a determination is even meaningful without greater specificity.
Similarly, I'm not sure if "State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation" is accurate in the same way. I suppose we have to unblur what "state" means.
I thank you for the back and forth though, which I enjoyed. I feel a need to do more reading on this topic, though I would guess much of these questions are not really falsifiable, as some of the answers are surely lost to history. Thanks, have a good day!
Thank you - brilliant
I don't necessarily buy the idea that someone with a chicken and needed bread wandered around looking for a baker in need of chicken, but their argument does fly in the face of the idea that barter follows failed currencies.
If nothing else you have a chicken and egg problem to unwind there, and barter does seem a bit more basic or simple than currency so I'd have guessed it came first.
You can watch both barter and currency develop in groups of children almost spontaneously.
IIRC, Graeber suggests that debt comes first. Initially it is tracked by memory, then when that gets too complicated, some kind of item is chosen to represent debt, which then in some cases evolves into currency. I believe this process has been observed.
The point is that they weren’t just used within a single group where everyone had access to more for the cost of only labor.
Sure it's evolved, but I don't see anything in your comment that really disputes the tie to force. Of course, taxation is connected to force. Additionally, as I addressed in another comment, a lack of modern "central authority" does not mean a lack of connection to "force" or violence. People can come up with distributed or atomized versions, which nevertheless arise under a similar tradeoff with respect to the fear of violence.
Speaking in terms of U.S. regulation and legislation, crypto is variously regulated as a "commodity" or as a "security" and therefore, cannot be formally considered a currency. The name, "cryptocurrency" is a marketing ploy, which cleverly seeks to dilute the meaning of the term, which is a term of art, and is still reserved, in legal circles, for things which are, in fact, currencies, and function as currencies, and are regulated as currencies, which crypto… is not.
It was rather painful to me in particular, because a few weeks ago, I registered and attended a municipal education session on fraud. And this session was co-hosted by an actual representative of the Arizona Corporation Commission - Securities Division. I can prove that because my prize for the session was an authentic, imprinted, ACC/SD pizza slicer! Anyway, as soon as she mentioned crypto and asserted it is a class of "currency" I tried to call her out, and I asked more than once, and being reluctant to turn the session into a referendum on her legal knowledge, I finally let her win. It was embarrassing.
Anyway, no, cryptocurrency has never been a currency. Not in the USA. Other nations may deem it as such, but I kind of doubt it so far. Please do not conflate real currency with crypto. They are distinct things that are easily distinguished. The consumer should not be deluded into thinking otherwise.
It's pretty restrictive. You couldn't just port bitcoin to a CRDT while keeping CALM. You'd have to rethink the economics around the constraints of what's possible to do in a distributed way. But maybe that would be worth doing anyway.
Also, to the power of modern-day cryptography that rubber-hose and evil maid (backdoors) are the only viable (even if expensive) alternatives.
> the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts
Both of which require "governance", but post-collapse, it may be of form that may not benefit the collective.
It doesn't prove the hardness assumption, if it did we could trot forward any toddler and ask if it knows the factors to some RSA product, and "prove" hardness assumption for factoring integers...
A high trust society. Everything else is downstream of that.
I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.
[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cut-Me-Own-Throat_Dibbler
I'm not sure. I want to say there's volunteering, charities, clubs, religions etc. But those all need resources (time, energy, money) put into them to remain viable. I suppose if something is unprofitable it means the resources (money or not) are drained faster than they go in, and the entity dissolves.