The Coal Standard

Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money? Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan...

 Money Allows for Easy Conversions

Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else. Brawn gets converted to brain when a discharged soldier

 Calories as Currency

When the world went on a single currency, they'd tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they'd made the new currency K's, kilocalories, because that's the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding "ration factor," so complicated that nobody could understand ...

 Money is Fiction

Ira Glass: For money, afterall, long ago, we used to use gold, and if you wanted to buy something, you had to carry around these heavy, shiny pieces of metal. Then we decided, no, let's just leave the gold in a bank. Instead of the gold, we're going to carry around these pieces of paper, and the paper on them says, "Yes, there's gold. You can take this paper money to a bank, you can swap it for gold." Maybe you've seen old dollars that say on them "Promise to pay the bearer so many dollars in...

 What If People Stopped Valuing Money?

Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizenes as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for mo...