Nick Szabo  🔑

19/ All this to say that I don't think Graeber understands the claims that other people like Menger and Mises have made. Furthermore, in no way do any of his claims prove that the case for barter is actually wrong.

20/ Thanks to @davidgerard and @ahcastor for encouraging me to write this thread. Bitcoiners are amazing.https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1085614469206691840 …

21/ Thanks to @mises, Robert Murphy, @NickSzabo4, and @saifedean for providing resources to help guide this thinking

Graeber is probably going to show up in this thread with histrionics (see: his meltdown after Taleb) but his book to me was a very straightforward statement of the idea that the hardness of money required for a trade varies with the mutual trust of the counterparties

He literally makes this point in his book. trading fish in your local village? favors (credit) probably suffice. intercontinental trade? silver or gold, because you'll never see your counterparty again. Bitcoin suits commerce of the latter form – money for enemies

It's really hard to read Debt and not see it as a very straightforward argument for the necessity of non-credit based money. Just like morality, credit cannot universalize. For trade among mutually mistrustful parties, hard and fast-settling commodity money is ideal

The money-from-barter theory is *theoretically* accurate, it can and indeed (as with the POWs) has happened. But a barter market (a) presupposes an efficient market, far more rare in prehistory than bilateral monopolies & coercive transactions, and (b) as observed is unstable.

As a result, what travelers, missionaries & ethnologists mostly observed among neolithic- or forager-like cultures was more alien to economists -- few spot markets or other use in day2day transactions, rather specialized stores of wealth used in fitness-critical wealth transfers.