Nick Szabo  🔑

I can agree in good faith to make payments to x, but if/when economic or personal conditions change through no fault of my own to point i can't afford payments, the only thing I have left to pledge to avoid default is my own personal autonomy.

Good for you, but bad for the also human counterpart(ies) who had been counting on you, and an utterly insecure basis for a monetary system.

THe monetary system is a reflection of human interactions and relations. These come part and parcel with credit and default risk. If you remove that feature from the money system, it can never act as a reliable abstracted system of real value allocation.

A debt based currency is a flawed system leading to artificial credit booms and credit busts. If credit is taken from a currency with a fixed supply, it reduces heavily those credit cycles.

If you are bound to every agreement you ever make, and can never adjust or default, you are effectively enslaved by your own pre-commitments irrespective of how relative circumstances or values can change.

Cryptocurrency of course does not make you "bound to every agreement you ever make", nor would such a fantastic state of affairs be more like slavery than taxes, the draft, or any other major coercive or quasi-coercive aspect of human existence. Stop making stuff up.

It does on a secondary level. I can say the same for you. The fact that you can't perceive the system for the much larger thing it is, is unfortunate.

A system that cannot tolerate default -- which is what a credit-free system aims to achieve -- is a system that tries to mould people into the needs of the system rather than vice versa.

There can still be credit in crypto in the form of asset based lending, eg @sweetbridgeinc

The critiques that apply to narrow banking and full-reserve systems apply to asset-based lending systems. I won't go into them as they're well communicated across multiple sources.

1/ How much do you know about utility value tokens? There are several blockchain projects I can think of that have usable utility tokens that increase in value as they are used more for said use case.

If you have something of value to sell, as Friedman would have said, your objective is not to discriminate against who purchases your item. If you only conduct sales with people who hold your own unit you are de facto limiting your market.

1/ Isn’t there value to existing network participants? Isn’t the idea that if the token can only be used in said network, and using said token increases its value, don’t network participants benefit?

No. It's a circular system which demands monopoly to create value. If you bought a token for x $ economic value today, your delayed redemption can only be worthwhile if underlying good is scarcer tomor than it is today.

Wouldn’t owning a token for its use case not be an investment unless the use case is purely for speculation? If you attain a token for its intended use case the redemption of value is instantaneous if it gives you access to the use case you need it for.