Bitcoin

luka

Well-known member
From what I've read barter never existed it's a mad myth invented by economists. Graeber says this he says all anthropologists know this.
 

catalog

Well-known member
it depends what you mean by 'never existed'. it still does exist right? i mean people still barter all the time now? but everyone very quickly realised that something else that is a better 'in between' was needed?

i think in small groups, there's always some medium of exchange, might not be quite what we think of as money tho. there is always something that measures economic value i think?
 

luka

Well-known member
It exists but never as the main mode of exchange eg Corpsey is sending me marvel blurays and I'm sending him a beautiful poem.
 

woops

is not like other people
the idea is that is was too annoying deciding how many cows were worth how many apples and cash was more malleable i think
 

luka

Well-known member
Graeber says if you want to know about primitive modes of exchange go to the anthropologists not the economists who just make stuff up as they feel like it
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Long-distance trade certainly existed for thousands of years before the invention of currency, so if it wasn't conducted by barter then it's hard to see what else it could have been.
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
Read the bitcoin standard by Saifedean Ammous, about half the book is about what money is. It's a great book and he'll receive the Nobel prize for economics before the decade is out. He sent me a manuscript before it was published in 2017.
A shame that aside from his expertise in Bitcoin he is a Covid-denying narcissist with sociopathic overtones. No one's perfect I guess.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Pretty much all our current problems stem from the free and easy debasement of the money in our pockets by central banks. Money that can be debased so easily, by printing in the trillions, is worth very little, as is demonstrated by inflation over time. Meanwhile, a cow or loaf of bread, for example, costs the same in gold as it did hundreds and thousands of years ago. Gold is hard money, but not the hardest. The hardest money that can not be debased or diluted is bitcoin.
But it has no intrinsic value. I mean if civilisation collapsed bitcoin would be gone, dollars etc would pretty much be gone - depending on the extent of the collapse, and gold would still have some value as a physical object, although it's not the most useful metal of course
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
From what I've read barter never existed it's a mad myth invented by economists. Graeber says this he says all anthropologists know this.
I've read that as a system it didn't exist to the extent it's commonly held to have done.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Long-distance trade certainly existed for thousands of years before the invention of currency, so if it wasn't conducted by barter then it's hard to see what else it could have been.
I'm just thinking out loud here... but my guess is that if someone travelled to another culture they didn't like swap a cow for a sheep and then go back and make a barter for that sheep and then come with a dog or whatever that the other culture wanted, maybe they came along with a big load of stuff and tweaked until they agreed a deal. A big swap but not a barter in terms of the single item you make for the single item they make kinda thing.
 
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