Currencies have always been a promise of some sort, and the value of the currency depends ultimately on the value of that promise.

Now the REALLY interesting thing about this observation is that we can all make our own promises too.

Hear me out:
The promise of gold and silver coinage was that the coins were pure and of a certain weight, and that the metal would continue to be in demand and supply would be limited - even though this promise was broken occasionally, e.g. by Mansa Musa or the Conquistadores.
The promise of gold-standard currencies is that they would remain convertable to gold, which layered another breakable promise on top of the previous promise of gold being a stable store of value. This promise has been broken too, most famously by US president Nixon in 1971.
The promise of modern fiat currencies is that the currency will be accepted for payment of national taxes and that it's value will not be inflated away by the awesome power of the printing press (actually, by "update table accounts set balance = 1000000000000000000000 where....")
The promise of cryptocurrencies is that they don't rely on any of the previous sets of promises, however they introduce a bunch of promises of their own, such as the security of the protocol and a faith in the manifest destiny of your favorite project's popularity.
Regardless of which promises a currency makes, it's just a particular form of "I promise this thing is valuable. Now give me something I want in exchange for it".

And as we have heard a million times, what differentiates that from barter is solving dual coincidence of wants.
But it also provides another huge benefit over barter that I first heard about from @patio11 ; The currency, either itself, or more usually these days via a bank or @Visa or @PayPal etc., Is acting as **an intermediary who is trusted by both parties**.
The value of a promise depends on the amount of trust you have in the person making the promise. And trust flourishes in situations of repeated interactions. Again, to quote @patio11 's tweet at:

"Another thing, probably underappreciated outside financial industry, is that intermediaries make one-off transactions part of a persistent reputation whose importance to each side is much larger than the transaction at issue, which decreases malfeasance over alternative."
Currency is basically bringing a third party into the transaction who is trusted by both sides. We can see this principle at work when scammers insist on things like Amazon Gift Card numbers as a form of payment.
So this is where things really get fun. This insight, that currency is a promise made through an intermediary, suggests that you can "print your own promises" and effectively use them as a currency substitute, if you can bring an intermediary into the equation.
How would that work? Well I'm glad you asked. What about if you wrap your promise to do-that-valuable-thing-you-do as a bearer voucher, so that it could be traded on secondary markets in an @ebay like or baseball card like fashion? And what if the degradation in the value of your
...promise due to your lack of established reputation and the uncertainty around third-party demand for your thing were offset by equivalent degradation of other's promises, producing rich opportunities for bargain hunting and speculation?
And what if this would naturally result in stronger players establishing both good reputation and credible claim to third-party demand over time? So that they could act as nodes in a graph of transitive exchange, where there are some big players that everyone trusts,
and slightly smaller players that they profit from trading with, and so on down various decentralized hierarchies of trust?
You would have a fractal system of self-created commodity currencies where the value of each person's outputs and trustworthiness could be discovered by market mechanisms. All of the flawed and vulnerable centralized promises of other currency systems would just disappear.
This also solves the serious issue that necessarily scarce "money" necessarily introduces a scarcity based restriction on trade (absent an infinite velocity of money, which is clearly a pipe dream). Examples of trade opportunities failing for want of liquidity currently abound.
It also provides an alternative opt-out mechanism to escape current monetary malfeasance by the powers that be, without having to buy into the dystopian randian hopium of the crypto-swamp.
Ford famously said if he had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse". Cryptocurrencies are that faster horse. They ape the monetary models that came before, and are a perversion of the opportunities for trust based trade that the internet creates.
Money can bring out the worst in even the best people, whereas systems of reputation have a tendency to bring out the best in even the worst people. Even ransomware hackers have good customer service because of this!
Let's not even get started on the waste and abuse that results from oligopoly control of our current loan-based fiat "money printing". Decentralization offers a clear win over that.
I also love the way something like this would offer a bottom-up #local alternative to centralized monetary policy. It feels really congruent with the fractal principles of societal organization that are championed by erudite twitter luminaries like @nntaleb and @normonics
It also sounds like a step in the right direction towards Charlie Munger's idealized vision of basing society not on punitive contract but rather on "a seamless web of deserved trust"
And saving the best for last: it's permissionless innovation. It's something a small group can start on their own, and that can grow organically, with no disastrous 20th century style mass societal experiment required.

Anyone want to play?

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