Re:The Dollar Is Dead
by crooked-v on Sunday August 03, 2025 @04:54PM
(#44779703)
Fiat currencies are the "grown up" result of realizing that everything else in modern society depends on people believing in the social contract, and that doing the same with currency is both more stable and more predictable than having an economy that depends on the amounts currently available of arbitrarily chosen rare metals.
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I would be interested to see if we could create an hours-worked currency.
Every person is given a similar amount of lifetime (only a few countries are exceptions).
Time can't inflate or deflate, is understood by all and easily measured, and it can't be stored. Taking it from others or trading it between people is difficult (we use money as a proxy instead).
Some obvious problems: quality of time, the value of different people's time is variable, retirement.
Re:The Dollar Is Dead
by mritterhoff on Sunday August 03, 2025 @08:05PM
(#44780935)
Sounds like "time banking", which has myriad flaws.
One of them is that your time is cheap when you're young and unskilled, and grows valuable as you grow old and become skilled (and have less time left). Each <unit of time> isn't equal for the same person, much less between them.
Yeah, we have 3 Time Bank organisations in my city (I'm not sure how they manage their economy internally): https://www.cinch.org.nz/categories/421/441/entries
I was probably thinking more along the lines of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day