Re: [ox-en] Apple trees (aka capitalism) are bad. What about barter exchange?
- From: Evgeni Pandurski <epandurski gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:34:03 +0300
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On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Diego Saravia <diego.saravia gmail.com>wrote:
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The biggest problem with money is that it basically introduces artificial
scarcity of one
particular good - the money itself.
mmm, to barter you need the good other want
with money you can buy even if you have nothing
This is not necessarily an advantage for money. Basically I am pretty
convinced
that money have huge problems that make them bad for virtually everything
but
local exchange. I believe the only reason we use money is because it is the
only
solution we have for "double coincidence of wants" problem barter has.
All the other problems are a logical
consequence from
the mentioned problem - interest, fiat money, credit.
credit, is a very useful institution, not related directly with money, but
facilitated by it.
Agreed. I meant money created by bank credit.
interest only reflect the fact that economy is a growing process and if you
acumulate money you cant grow with it, so you must pay to have useless
money.
If salt were scarce, interest on salt credits would naturally appear.
Barter exchange does
not have this
problem because it does not introduce any scarcity that have not existed
before.
money removes the natural scarcity of a barter system.
Barter does not introduce new scarcity. But it is limited by its ability to
facilitate
exchange by the "double coincidence of wants" bottleneck. Which is exactly
the
problem what I am trying to solve.
http://economics.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-double-coincidence-of-wants.htm
money have problems, for example if there are a rich people and a lot of
poor people (as happens)
the rich one could buy all the apples, and the poor people do not have a
way
even to taste one of it
if you gives one apple per person you will have a fair system. But the
origin of the problem is a capitalistic problem, not a specific money
problem. The problem is that exists a very rich people. Barter do not solve
this kind of problem.
Any kind of exchange could potentially lead to inequality. This problem can
not
be solved by any trading system. What I am trying to design and implement is
a system that would be less easily abusable than money.
General idea is that lots of people
declare what
they have for sale and what they seek to buy and the computerized system
offers them
appropriate circular barter transaction.
how do you establish relative exchange rates?
Every peer sets prices for his products. Prices can be represented in any
universally
known good (like EUR for example). The most important thing to notice here
is that
peers use money (or any other universally known scarce good) only to measure
the
estimated value for their products. Peers DO NOT need to posses money (or
any
other globally scarce good in that matter) in order to trade successfully.
I take for granted that all traded goods are infinitely divisible which in
practice is not
true for many concrete goods, but in principal every good can be wrapped by
some
abstraction to become infinitely divisible.
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