I agree that debt is slavery, but so is govt fiat. Saving in govt paper means being hit hardest by inflation. Saving in any other asset that is held or managed by some institution, means what you think is yours may not be when push comes to shove. And carrying gold across borders rarely works out well. Stacking some Bitcoin & storing your own keys is more important than getting completely out of any debt you can comfortably afford to service.
Discussion
“I’ll pay for your stuff. Just hit me back later.”
“How dare you try to enslave me!?!”
Banks create the money for free. They literally lend it into existence. You apply for a loan to buy a house & the bank just adds the value of the house to the asset column on their balance sheet.
If I'm the bank, & my "paying for your stuff" costs me nothing & actually devalues everyone else's savings, & then you have to pay me back for a cost I have imposed on others, that's you serving me, not the other way around.
Debt in an honest financial system is more self destructive than it is slavery. But the dishonest debt of a fiat system is slavery if you do & slavery if you don't. Savers are taxed heaviest by inflation, debt is subsidized & rewarded.
While its true the banks create money, that is also the ONLY way money is created. They never, though, create the money for interest. So where then, does that money to pay interest come from?
It comes from everyone else. All financial sector growth comes at the expense of everyone else & every other part of the economy. It's not a service, it's parasitic.
There are two parts to this answer:
1) The money supply is expanding and some of the new money goes towards interest.
2) Dollars can be used more than once, so even with hard money there’s no mechanical issue with being able to pay interest.
With hard money, everything that is loaned was perviously earned. No one can loan anything they don't have. Fractional reserve is easily recognized as fraud.
If you loan money into existence & pull more out than you put in, you are profiting from nothing but a trick of political privilege. It is a net drain from productive people to parasites no matter how many times money changes hands.
By extension interest, because it doesn’t actually exist is simply theft. Usury is evil.
No, interest is rent. If you can loan someone a car & charge rent for access to the car, you can loan them the money to buy a car & charge rent for access to the money.
I don’t see how debt continues to be widely used under a hard money (bitcoin) standard. The fiat world is based on debt. I expect a bitcoin standard to be based on savings and equity (profit sharing).
True, loans will be risky for the loan maker & costly for the person in debt. So the supply & demand should both be much lower than today where the cost of making a loan is zero & the cost of servicing debts is eroded over time by inflation.
I love that Bitcoin has gotten so many people to think about money for the first time, but other people have been thinking about money for a long time and already addressed these issues.
Before fiat, there was a savings and loans industry. It is inarguably possible to pay interest on a hard money system, because that’s what happened for thousands of years.
It’s not clear what system you’re referring to. I’m not aware of any savings and loans industry operating for thousands of years under a pure hard money system.
If you’re looking for historical analogues, consider that under a gold standard, the Muslim world outlawed the payment of interest.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/islamic_investing.asp
Also consider that the payment of interest mathematically requires an elastic monetary supply to function. If there are only 21 million bitcoin, how can x% more be repaid? You can’t go to a bank and borrow new units into existence. Theoretically you would have to purchase those units from holders at unknown cost, making it impossible to know the real cost of your loan from the outset.
Thank you for that. That is the point I was failing to make. Beautifully put.
Interest is not rent, especially if you’re talking about a financial system in which there are a finite number of currency units. Interest doesn’t exist as money in the bitcoin system.
Interest doesn’t exist in the fiat system as money either, it simply creates requirements and incentives for theft. Once introduced, it acts like a parasitic virus ultimately destroying the host.
Idk what you mean by "interest doesn't exist as money."
If someone can grant you access to a car or a house or a tractor & charge you for the time that you have access to any of those things, why can't someone grant you access to money to buy any of the above & charge you for the time you have access to their money? Who is going to stop this from happening?
I do think there will be much less money lending & more lending of physical capital, like cars & tractors, because the value of saving & reducing upfront costs is higher under a Bitcoin standard. And the risk of loaning a bearer asset form of money is probably higher than loaning a vehicle which can be tracked & disabled & more easily retrieved by force. But lending is not inherently evil or destructive. It is just risky & prone to corruption.
It doesn't necessarily follow that there will be less money lending. While the price of lending will undoubtedly be higher, this will force more human capital to ideate and execute on higher quality projects. I can foresee a world where society is awash in high quality, resilient businesses, creating higher order capital goods and enabling more resilient businesses to emerge.
Remember, higher price of capital means investors make profits faster, increasing the velocity of credit in the system.
I disagree. I think financial sector gowth for the last 100 years has been wildly distorted & it should be something closer to the size & % of the economy that it was prior to the creation of the Fed.
I don't think there is any possible way for lending to be higher in an economy built on sound money, when today more people are in debt than are not. In a sound monetary system, the supply of funds available to be loaned is necessarily only a portion of the supply of money saved. There always has to be more savings than debt in a sound monetary system. And today things are exactly the opposite.
This is an interesting question. I think that ceteris paribus there would be less lending, if only because demand for loans would be so much lower in a world where the remaining balance isn’t depreciating.
However, a lot of things will be different on a Bitcoin standard, including greater general prosperity and a more stable economy. Those are both factors that are generally thought to increase the size of credit markets.
In a pure fiat monetary system, a bond is issued by the treasury in exchange for fiat from the fed. If this is the only way money is created, then interest charged on this money can never be repaid with fiat, because the fiat money to pay the interest wasn’t created along with it. Make sense? It’s a trick to extract a forever cash flow at an ever increasing rate, consolidating ownership, necessitating higher prices, which requires more debt. Once introduced to a financial system, there is no stopping it. I view bitcoin as the antidote to this distortion. There is a transition period where lending will happen and fiat money will exist along side bitcoin, but eventually a majority will only want sats and nobody will trade sats for fiat, especially in a cbdc world.
It is evil to charge a fee to enable someone to expedite their consumption?