Nick Szabo  🔑

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.

You just likened negative interest to several enumerated forms of theft. P.S. hundreds of millions of people opt for paper for various transactions. As NIRP spreads & deepens, as bank fees etc. climb, the number of people using paper and number of txs they use it for will grow.

No, I said that paying a bank for storage is a way to avoid theft. And see my other message. If you pay a security guard to protect your stuff from theft also a form of theft?

The bank is NOT storing it, it is lending it out and generating a return on it. That "stuff" is bearer asset protected by the security guard. But that bank deposit is really just an IOU, whereas the bank has taken the bearer asset and lent it out.

Right, but if you go back to the original thread, what if a bank winds up in a situation in which they have no further profitable investments to make?