upvote
It's totally impractical to interview everybody who has ever offered you money for some reason, figure out how they got it, and how they got it, and determine if that set of people is working to undermine your efforts, just so you can decide whether to accept the money. The information burden is just too high, so people simply don't do it. We turn a blind eye to the cases when our work harms our neighbors, they do the same regarding us, and we all end up with less because of it. We could all have more if we automated that computational burden and instead just refused to participate in the negative externalities by refusing money that drives them.

But it requires types of debt which are not exchangable for one another. Whether it's working to take us to Mars or it's working to provide healthcare to our neighbors is something that debt should declare directly, it should not require a duplicate investigation at each transaction.

reply
> figure out how they got it

They got it by you accepting their promise to deliver something of value in the future. If nobody out there is willing to accept their promise of delivering future value, they don't have anything. That's the whole abstraction. It is materialized out of thin air when you agree to accept the promise.

Some new kind of hypothetical accounting system cannot possibly change anything. It will always be a hindsight account of the promise that was made. The only possible change is for you to tackle the promises themselves. Which requires talking to people. That is where the promises are made.

reply
Hey thanks for this discussion. I've gotta run, but I appreciate the willingness to engage with my weird ideas, even if you're unconvinced that it's a problem that "something of value" means something wildly different things depending on who you ask.
reply