What even IS “currency,” when you get right down to it?
Don’t tell me about the little green papers. Not when there’s AMEX.
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State backed I.O.U
Money is a transferrable form of debt, and debt is emotion. You do something for someone or give someone something. They are then “indebted” to you. Or the reverse - you’ve been issued a fine, meaning some of the “debt” others owed to you for something valuable is now void because you did something interpreted negatively.
The physical money symbolizes the feeling of indebtedness, and standard currencies allow people to recognize one anothers’ debts as something commonly valuable and transferrable for symbolizing new debts.
It sounds kind of like karma, but because money is just symbolic for debt and not actually the real manifestation of the emotions associated with the causes of the indebtedness, having a lot of money, or vice-versa, doesn’t translate to a karmic judgment of a person. Someone can trick their way into making others feel indebted to them, at least at the point in time of the emotion to money exchange. Or, they can literally steal the “debt markers” that others accrued. Or, one can decide that one kind of debt is not worth as much as another kind of debt - foreign exchange rates, employment wages, etc mediate this mostly in the sense that human time is not valued identically depending on where a person lives or who they are.
And you can be “wealthy” without money, as long as enough people feel indebted to you and you can “exchange” that indebtedness for the things you want. The money is just for easy debt accounting and transfer.
Money is a promise given to you that someone else will be ready to give you something you want if you give money to them.
And you trust the money to be useful when you need to make other humans do stuff, it can be giving their time or owning something that you didn’t own before.
Money itself don’t have any value, it’s a pointer to anything of value. Without money it would be very hard to know exactly how rare is rice compared to sweater. But now using money you can know that you require same amount of human efforts for bringing 70 kg of rice as 1 pcs of sweater to the superstore.
This sounds like how Seinfeld describes checks.
It’s a devised method of trading value for other things of value. It used to be pretty rocks, then precious metals, then pieces of paper, and now it’s bits on computers. As Drew Carey once said, the everything is made up and the points don’t matter anyway. Except when those points are the difference between having a heated home or freezing your ass off in a cardboard box behind a Safeway.
Symbolic labour
Me monkey. Me have 50 banana. Too many banana. Me give you banana. You give promise rock. Later i no have banana. Give back promise rock. You give me banana. Money am tomorrow banana. Promise rocks imaginary now. Count rocks with lightning. “Less fraud” says governmonkey
Sounds like you need to read the book Debt: the first 5000 years by David Graeber.
One answer: The ability to pay taxes to the largest local military power, in exchange for keeping a ‘good’ relationship with the legal system it operates with.
Another: a tool for coordination and distribution of resources between large groups of people that does not require very many (or very long) meetings.
This was a pretty good series on the subject. He goes into what “currency” is right at the beginning
At one time, it was a government promise to exchange for a certain amount of gold. After that became a limit on growth of a nation it becomes “fiat currency” which is simply a conceptual agreement of value to make the exchange of goods and services easier. This is your AMEX money.
