What If Money Expired

One of the things that drew me to this whole blockchain thing way back when was the idea of money. I’m not a financier, nor banker, nor able to manage anything like the complex machinations that many people my age can with interest and recursively paying yourself and all the other sorts of wholly above board games to squeeze more numbers out of less. What has always fascinated me most about this crypto currency thing is the design of money. I thought this was the first time anyone deliberately took this on as a project. As always, I’m horribly wrong.

The article What If Money Expired? explores times when this happened. They are fascinating and surprisingly progressive and sound.

The interesting bit is not just the intrinsic goal of penalising hoarding, but of spreading money around. It has to keep on circulating. It’s communal money maybe? You just need to keep on going places and spending it. Or maybe you just would online? Maybe this could be a CBDC mechanism? Remember those Central Bank Digital Currency things that were supposed to happen? But there is a lot more and that is idea of designing money on purpose because it is everywhere in our lives and societies and structures and yet we don’t even think about it.

Money may be a language, a way to translate value in terms we all understand, but money is not the sum of what we have to say. The more money one has, the less meaning work has to that person. At the same time, life’s most meaningful work, like raising children or cooking a meal for others, often goes unpaid. And yet this is the substance of life, the stuff that determines who we are and how we will be remembered.

Gesell believed that capitalism had beaten communism, but he recognized the flaws of our current economic order. “The choice lies between progress or ruin,” he wrote. “We must push on through the slough of capitalism to the firm ground beyond.”