Denationalisation of money

What Hacker News says

1. dagerothApr 2007
   I don't think that a central authority is necessary for money to work, at least not in form of a monopolist. Actually the current systems are rather unsatisfying because a state can loose its credibility and thus the trust in its curreny quite fast, basically as soon as war looms on the horizon or it becomes apparent that it will default on its debt. In the last 25 years over 87 currencies crashed. And because of the monopoly of the state on money the whole economy is usually going down along. For my part I would therefore abandon the monetary monopoly of the state and allow competition, allow companies to issue money. When they connect their name to the currency and have no legal power to make their money legal tender they will have a much stronger incentive to provide a good and stable money. Hayek wrote a fascinating treatise on the denationalisation of money, and with the ongoing globalisation sooner or later we will get used to juggle with more than one currency in our pockets. Second Life seems to be a step in the direction that companies start to issue private currencies and when states, especially in the developing countries, will fail to keep their currency stable chances are that they will be replaced by private currencies.

   Equally interesting and probably easier to believe are gold backed currencies with competing private institutes issuing goldbacked money.

   Still, its great to see people thinking about money in another way than just how to get it.

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2. bwestergardNov 2022
   We can have an international unit of account through, e.g. Special Drawing Rights. This makes plain the political bargains struck to ensure international economic stability. Crypto alternatives would have the same political valence as a return to the gold standard, which was abandoned to avoid the crisis potentials peculiar to it.

   The most influential statement of your proposal is Hayek's article "Choice in Currency: A Way To Stop Inflation"[1] which he later expanded on in "Denationalisation of Money".

   Hayek's views have an admirable internal consistency, but his political premises are contrary to the core values of almost every pre-industrial society, and of the social democratic tradition in Europe which has been internationally influential.

   Very few people understand the full scope of Hayek's political vision, which is premised on a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the very possibility of rational democratic deliberation. If they fully understood his proposal's implications, I doubt they'd support them; but certainly there are some who are willing to fully own their anti-democratic implications.

   1: https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/choice-in-currency-...

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3. abecedariusSep 2022
   Of the other Hayek I've read, none of it's any easier to read. I do think he's worth the time to get his point of view to sink in. (I don't think the same of Austrians in general.)

   Perhaps most relevantly he wrote a book on the idea of competing private currencies (Denationalisation of Money -- it seemed meant for people with more knowledge of economics or finance than me).

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4. adultorataAug 2022
   In a way yes, you don't understand it completely, DeFi space is close to solving inflation, we're just really really early, yes, 99% of tokens will die, but that 1% that lives will be the building foundation of the future of smart money, novel winning economist Hayek proposed denationalisation of money and we are finally witnessing it, I do seriously think you don't understand it.
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5. abecedariusJul 2019
   There's a difference that could be important: Libra is effectively a bank, and like other banks creates money, but the new money is not denominated in dollars, it's in Libra. If American banks create too many dollars, that's a problem for every American, since Americans up to now have been pretty much stuck with using dollars. If Libra mismanages their supply and reserves, the main effect will be on the market price of Libra, right? Am I understanding things correctly?

   With the banks we're used to there's a potential tragedy of the commons in that their separate decisions all affect the shared money supply, which is indistinguishable, so one reason to have a central bank is to get some overall control of those distributed decisions. A distinct competing currency already under a single decision maker doesn't so obviously need that extra governance. I don't know, maybe it does, but I'd like to see the reason spelled out.

   (Hayek raised this point in his Denationalisation of Money.)

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6. paulgbNov 2017
   That's not what Gresham's law says. As Hayek put it in denationalisation of money (section VI The confusion about Gresham's Law):

   > Gresham's Law will apply only to different kinds of money between which a fixed rate of exchange is enforced by law

   (Emphasis in the original)

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