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All Human Relationships are Built on Trust

The idea of trustless money is ludicrous, because there's no such thing as a trustless social relationship. This applies for business relationships or personal relationships. Without trust, that dog won't hunt. Trust, violence, or the threat of violence is what backs any currency. I include the latter two things, because the US dollar is backed both by faith in the US government and fear of the US military.

So what backs a currency pegged to a precious metal like gold or silver? Trust that we won't find a new and ready source of the metal. Trust in the status quo. See why gold is beloved by conservatives? When bloodthirsty men looted the Americas in the 1500s and shipped incredible amounts of gold home to mother Europe, gold lost its value. Goldbugs don't talk about the inflation in Spain during the 16th century. they don't want to admit that their "eternal store of value" is in fact built on nothing more and nothing less than faith, just like any other currency.

Likewise cryptocurrency people don't want to acknowledge the incredible amount of faith propping up their favored store of value. In fact, they want more people to join the church of Satoshi.

There's this concept in occultism known as the egregore. For the folks who haven't taken an interest in the occult, here's the definition from the Font of all Knowledge, AKA Wikipedia. My fellow esoterica nerds know exactly where I'm going with this, I'm sure.

Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an occult concept representing a certain non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people. Historically, the concept referred to angelic beings, or watchers, and the specific rituals and practices associated with them, namely within Enochian traditions.^[1]

More contemporarily, the concept has referred to a psychic manifestation, or thoughtform, occurring when any group shares a common motivation—being made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of the group.

I'm using this latter contemporary sense here, and not the former definition from Enochian traditions or whatever. I.E., a psychic manifestation of a group motivation. By now you're probably thinking that I've lost my mind, but bear with me please. Ignore the "woo-woo" aspect. You don't need to believe in psychic manifestations or any other such thing. I'm not fully convinced either way. I could just as well have used the term "meme" as egregore, but meme has less mystique. I submit to you that money fits the definition of an egregore, and it only has power inasmuch as we, collectively, give it power.

I sometimes joke that I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny more than I believe in money. That's not quite true. Money definitely has power. It can make the difference between having a roof over one's head and sleeping on the street. But it only has power because people invest faith in it. If everyone world-wide were to join me tomorrow and say that money is worthless, it would be true. Compare this with scientific fact. If everyone in the world joined me tomorrow and proclaimed that the law of gravity did not exist, I would still be as flat as a pancake if I took a leap from the Empire State Building whilst singing R. Kelly's "I Believe I can Fly".

Thanks for reading my rambling musings. Keep on trusting. Keep on building real human relationships in a human-scale world.

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