Money is an interesting concept. It is by far the most popular hallucination in our world. I mean, when you see two kids fighting with sticks, and pretending to be chevaliers, you obviously smile. But when you give away a day of work in exchange of a piece of paper, you're not. At their core, these two activities are identical: people engaging in them are pretending, are doing some sort of role playing, are projecting their imagination onto outside props.
The money hallucination is getting even weirder when you start thinking how that piece of paper is created.
If that banknote will be a contract between me and my employer, its value will remain constant for as long as there will be trust between me and my employer - or, to continue the metaphor, for as long as we both accept the same hallucination. We will both know, and enforce, the limits of our trust.
But the banknote is printed by somebody else. We don't have a direct contract with that entity. We don't even agree on all the components of the hallucination, like how many notes should be printed, when, etc.
So, what's happening with this rogue printing is that we get a gap between the trust and the value. Because we're not sharing the same hallucination, trust is not catching up with the value on the paper. The trust is shrinking, while the paper supply is increasing.
One way to solve this problem will be to bring back the paper supply to the trust level. Or, in layman terms, to burn some notes. In geek terms, that will be to "send them to the /dev/null". But we have a problem. There is no /dev/null for the USD.
And that is a BIG problem. It's not the printing itself that is dangerous, but the fact that it's not balanced with the burning. If there is enough trust, let them print. It's the same trust that allows people in crypto to print their own coins. They can do that because they establish a trust relationship, and that relationship is balanced with limiting mechanisms. Bitcoin, as we all know, has a limited supply, there won't be any satoshi left after we finish the 21 millions. Cub Finance, a project you most likely know about, since you're reading this, has a very transparent burning strategy.
As you can see from the screenshot above, 12.30% from the entire CUB supply was burned. This was announced from the beginning of the project and it is enforced. This burning mechanism is a preventive measure, one that aims to keep the trust invested in the project, and the value of the coins, in sync. There are, obviously, other ways to enforce trust, like "diamond hands", use cases for the token, etc, but the burning is just as important.
And the fact that there is no /dev/null for the USD, or for any other state-owned currency, is, like I said, a BIG problem.
And a strong case in favor of currencies which have this mechanism in place.
There is an ongoing funding proposal for two of my Hive-related projects, which will allow me to support some of the costs involved. If you want to support this proposal, all you have to do is to vote it using any of the two links below:
Sign this proposal with Hivesigner
Peakd: https://peakd.com/me/proposals/165
I'm a geek, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Hive you may stay updated by following me 
Wanna know when you're getting paid?
| I know the feeling. That's why I created hive.supply, an easy to use and accurate tool for calculating your HIVE rewards | |