@mettodo got me into this on Discord:
So yeah, against the background of my mountain hiking insight that I can just go out on dates with theoretical paradigms, and I don’t necessarily have to marry any of them, I’m wide open to alternative views on money, banking, etc.
Having delved quite a bit into the ancient origins of “capital”, it strikes me that the main point of commodity money was to minimize human relationships in transactional processes. It was about taking economies to scale by letting strangers transact without relational ties (like kinship, or ruler-subject). “Alienation” was a feature, not a bug. Our problem now is we have a different set of problems. We now need to bring relationships back in. But if we do that by collapsing transactional relationships back to the village level, we will in effect be going post-apocalyptic. Nothing like current global populations can be supported that way.
My general feeling is we need a multi-layered, multi-capital redefinition of “money”. We need the convenience of tokenized exchange. But we need relational depth in understanding what we are getting, who we are getting it from, what was the production process, what were the “externalities”, and so on. I’m liking Promise Protocol as a move in that direction. PP is about multi-layered trust-building. It seems we could devise a PP-supported exchange process, in which reputation is built in through things like the Sponsio mechanism.