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We need altcoins as long as we interact economically over the net, with people we do not know (or simply with people outside our local communities). If we try to imagine what qualities a "solarpunk coin" should have, what are your thoughts? Do we know any existing coin, checking all boxes? This question is more about political economy of Solarpunk, then its technology.
I’m interested in currencies with depreciating value as an incentive to spend or loan money without incentivizing excess wealth hoarding. This was first proposed by Silvio Gesell over 100 years ago but modern digital currencies may make the idea far easier to implement.
Thoughts?
That wouldnt go very well for poorer people.
Imagine spending 90% of your income to survive while the 10% youre saving for a car/house goes to shit because of a stupid incentive to spend?
Hell no
This is just one idea. It is not meant to solve every problem. Though, frankly, I don’t think your critique is very relevant. The poor typically have little or no savings and spend their money immediately. So they should be largely unaffected by this. And increased spending and lending by the more privileged should benefit the poor to some extent, as will the reduction in the wealthy’s spending power.
But yes I think further ideas and programs would be needed to fully solve poverty. This type of currency would easily accommodate a UBI or similar benefit programs since the natural reduction in money supply would solve any issues of inflation typically associated with large direct payments to citizens.
Its not very cognizant of you to assume that poor people dont/cant save money. Youre implying that they are poor because they dont save or youre implying that they just cant save because of how poor they are which is mostly untrue.
While a good idea in theory, such currencies are never going to be very popular as people loath easily visible and (externally) enforced inflation.
It is also not really all that different from a currency issuing entity regularly making additional money and causing inflation that way. Silvio Gesell developed his theories in contrast to largely gold pegged currencies of his time, and one can argue that fiat currencies of today are already largely implementing his ideas albeit on a larger scale, making the regional benefits less apparent.
The way to make this work is imho to clearly link the inflation to funding of widely agreed on common infrastucture spending through.
This is the kind of comment that I would expect from a Solarpunk, a critical, curious and hopeful hint to start a discussion towards a positive productive possible outcome, instead of the regular neo-rural cottagecore luddite cryptophobia rants
It does not work at scale because people who want to stash wealth will just buy things they can later resell, gold for instance. Or dollars.
Yeah I’m not really sure how to overcome this. Maybe povoq is correct that money printing is an easier solution, since it doesn’t require direct participation from the wealthy.
I’m still interested in experimenting with this idea though. Most other forms of wealth besides money have downsides, even gold. Hoarding physical goods is harder to do secretly and requires storage and security costs.