Nick Szabo  🔑

In other words it is as I said, it doesn't have anything to do with the costs of storage, except that, to try to make deeper or longer NIRP work without squeezing banks, central banks need unprecedented laws to try to make the costs of holding physical alternatives higher.

I'm skeptical that it's laws which stand in the way to holding physical alternatives, as opposed to the fact that there's a limit to how much cash you'd be willing to hold in your home due to security and convenience,

People's attitudes & security measures about paper money vary widely & can change dramatically depending on trust in banks. They will also have stronger incentives to switch to cryptocurrency, which with multisig is far more secure to hold than paper money.

Sure, I get that, but what I'm saying is that it's not the law that's the major impediment. It's cost of security. Knowledge, training convenience and so forth.

People have been using coins & paper money for thousands of years, despite the robbers, highwaymen, and pirates. Effective weapons and big lawns help, one of the reasons deep or long NIRP would require much more draconian laws in the U.S. than they do at least so far in Europe.

Sure, and people still use that stuff, but I also think you can think of robbers, highwaymen and pirates as a form of negative rates. And if people started holding more cash, there would be more robbers, highwaymen and pirates, meaning deeper implied negative rates on cash.

So negative interest rates are a form of theft. Thank you for that admission.

I'm not, personally, a fan of NIRP. I don't think it accomplishes what it sets out to do. But I don't think it's theft. And I don't think it's laws against holding physical currency (or metals or whatever) that explains why people don't opt to do that.