Like at some point won’t all of the profit be squeezed out of society?

  • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    Technically, money is just a number on a ledger. Practically, there’s a finite amount of wealth in the solar system, much less on earth, significantly less accessible to humans and only a slim amount can be taken from the working class before people start starving. We already have little enough that the population is going to start contracting.

    • workerONE@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Numbers in ledgers is a description of banking but money and banking are not the same thing.

      Alternatively you could be describing money management, keeping a ledger of an account. Money management is the management of money but it is not money itself.

      A collection of coins or bills is worth a certain amount and when you add or remove money the amount changes but you do not need to update any accounts.

      • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 days ago

        I’m making a distinction between money as a system of abstracting wealth and what wealth practically means. You’re making a highly disputable philosophical argument about the ontological nature of money instead of engaging with the germaine ideas. Simply put: I don’t consider a physical representation of money to be money in-and-of-itself; I consider each bill to be a part of a grand fragmented ledger. Furthermore, bitcoin is literally a public ledger for which there is no physical exchange of any representation of money. As a final example, the Yap isles famously have a monetary system that has physical Incarnations but no physical exchange among the people of the isles. It’s literally just a public ledger that exists in the minds of those who use it.