Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/05/monetagium.html

by jpkoning • 2 years ago

128 58 2 years ago

jpkoning.blogspot.com

tempodox• 2 years ago

Today's feudal lords plaster you with advertising and enshittification. Paying a ransom fee doesn't help any more.

c22• 2 years ago

The ransom is the 8 dollar a month subscription that turns the ads off.

immibis• 2 years ago

It turns the obvious ads off, and the quality still goes down the drain.

nerdponx• 2 years ago

When it's even available. But then they start cranking the ratchet, increasing the no-ad price and introducing a with-ads tier at the old no-ad price, or cutting quality, or cutting corners on customer service and security, etc etc. We've seen this play out many many times and it's a fundamental outcome in even the most basic econ 101 models: an oligopoly with high switching costs is more profitable for suppliers than a free market, made all the moreso by tacit collusion. An unregulated free market is essentially doomed to fail whenever an opportunity to establish such an oligopoly arises.

In extreme cases it does start to look like a protection racket, especially when important services like broadband Internet are involved.

nehal3m• 2 years ago

The wanton surveillance ads are based on stays though! Can’t give up that revenue.

aziaziazi• 2 years ago

Great, I can pay a ranson to avoid debasement to avoid tax !

hliyan• 2 years ago

A 100 years from now, someone is going to write an article about the insanity of today's advertising models that is going to be immediately obvious to anyone from that era, while we, much like the feudal vassals, are unable to see it, having experienced no alternative.

otabdeveloper4• 2 years ago

The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too?

(Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)

xandrius2• 2 years ago

To be fair when that was the case (before the Internet with ads) many people were not older than 18yo, so of course they wouldn't be complaining about stuff like that.

But yes, I hated adverts with passion as a child too. I didn't complain about the industry as a whole, I just hated their existence.

speeder• 2 years ago

TVs all used to have an "adblocker" in the form of people just switching away from the channel for whatever time ads last on that channel.

This means that ad companies also had to be wildly creative to make people WANT to watch them.

6510• 2 years ago

An American visiting the Netherlands in the 80's was watching TV and asked if we purchased the (American) movie because of a lack of advertisements. When he learned it was just TV he was furious. It had never occurred to him that it wasn't necessary to constantly interrupt movies.

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

"democracies have not resorted to modern version of debasement as a revenue source due to the unpopularity of rising prices."

The USA got rid of silver in its coins in 1964 and I believe copper in its pennies recently.

The modern version of debasement is in the feds balance sheet, they've gotten so efficient there's no need to affect the physical substance.

Arainach• 2 years ago

The US penny switched to copper-plated zinc in 1982, so not that recently (and it still contains a small percentage of copper).

pavlov• 2 years ago

Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation.

The example I’m familiar with is from Finland in 1946, when the most popular and largest circulating bills were required to be physically cut in half and lost 50% of their upfront value.

The Wikipedia article seems to be only in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setelinvaihto

The idea was that the left half of the bill remained valid cash (although not for long — you needed to exchange it for a new type of bill within a few months). The right half of the bill became effectively a treasury note with three-year maturation: in 1949 you could present it to a bank and get your money back from the government, but no sooner.

The operation was expected to reduce inflation, but apparently it didn’t work out that way. It did provide the Finnish government with about half of the funds loaned that year, but it was very unpopular among voters and never repeated.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

That's just such an interesting idea and approach. It's one of those things you'd never think someone would go from ideation to actual implementation, and yet it happened.

bobthepanda2• 2 years ago

Probably the most successful was the Plano Real in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real?wprov=sfti1

According to economists, one of the causes of inflation in Brazil was the inertial inflation phenomenon. Prices were adjusted on a daily basis according to changes in price indexes and to the exchange rate of the local currency to the U.S. dollar. Plano Real then created a non-monetary currency, the Unidade Real de Valor ("URV"), whose value was set to approximately 1 US dollar. All prices were quoted in these two currencies, cruzeiro real and URV, but payments had to be made exclusively in cruzeiros reais. Prices quoted in URV did not change over time, while their equivalent in cruzeiros reals increased nominally every day.

thaumasiotes6• 2 years ago

Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation.

Cash debasement and inflation are the same thing.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

Nowadays debasement and the resulting inflation comes from loans creating cash flow out of thin air. The 20% debasement has turned into the functionally zero percent interest rates. The ritual of bringing coins to the mint for exchange has turned into investments. The feudal lord's turbocharged revenue has turned into the profits of billion dollar corporations.

fny• 2 years ago

I’d argue the fed funds rate is also a minor debasement mechanism since they pay interest out of think air on deposits they hold.

stavros• 2 years ago

Is that not exactly the same? The feudal lords took 100 coins, made 120 coins out of them (while both keeping the same value and claiming that they can make more coins because they have different value), which is basically exactly printing money.

It's an interesting hack where the value of a coin and the cost of a coin (the amount of silver in it) were decoupled, and they pretended that the amount of silver in it is what mattered (hence they kept the same total amount of silver) but actually the value of the coin mattered (because they created value out of thin air by giving you 20 extra coins that were each still worth one pound (or whatever) each).

I don't understand why they didn't just mint a bunch of silver coins of the lower content and spent them themselves, effectively buying coins for 20% less than they were worth. Maybe they didn't have enough silver, or didn't want to create two kinds of the same coin with different silver content each.

panarky2• 2 years ago

If an expanding central bank balance sheet means debasement, what does it mean when the balance sheet is shrinking?

Because the opposite of "debasement" has been happening for some time now.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1rdgN

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

Bitcoin fixes this for the first time in human history. I’m excited about a future without monetary debasement. How many wars have been started by the “print more money until it is worthless, oops I have to start a war to fix it” spiral?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement

tomrod• 2 years ago

Almost. Because Bitcoin is highly energetic compared to currency, it isn't all the way there. And novel attacks exist for digital currency that are not present in physical currency. Currency has to be tradeable with marginal cost nearly zero (will never be exactly zero), and in my view digital currency has this as an issue. The analogue for digital currency, when appropriately crafted and not a sh*tcoin, is gold. Hard to get, limited in volume, costly to secure and appropriately manage. Gold can be used for currency, but it is awfully insecure to hoarding and banditry.

Fiat currency solves a _lot_ of problems while also having limitations broadly railed against by digital currency advocates.

MadnessASAP2• 2 years ago

It doesn't in any way fix things. The underlying point of debasement and other schemes outlined in the article was to generate revenue for the government. Now governments use taxes to generate revenue and inflation to encourage circulation.

While taxes and inflation are generally unpopular they are also vital to the functioning of society and the economy. BTC and many other token schemes implicitly or explicitly stand in the way of that.

Breaking a system you don't like doesn't automatically get you a system that's better.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Breaking a system you don't like doesn't automatically get you a system that's better.

At this point the US debt is growing by 1 trillion every... 100 days. The system is breaking by itself, not because of Bitcoin.

While taxes and inflation are generally unpopular they are also vital to the functioning of society and the economy.

Some taxes and some inflation. We're way past these.

psychlops2• 2 years ago

Coincidentally, inflation (effectively a hidden tax) is also a way for governments to ignore democratic society and divert wealth into pet projects such as unpopular global wars.

There is a reason war bonds aren't sold any more to fund them.

ffgjgf12• 2 years ago

Now governments use taxes to generate revenue and inflation to encourage circulation.

They always used taxes primarily whenever they could. Significant debasement was almost exclusively an outcome of extreme desperation when you had no other options left. If anything expanding the monetary supply is much easier now than when specie money was used. Debasement of course never worked longterm anyway but it was really only feasibly useful when you had the monopoly on issuing currency (e.g. the Roman Empire). In medieval Europe you’d just stop accepting the coins issued by the the city/lord/king who did that, which would be pretty easy when they put both their stamp and the year of issue on it.

idontknowtech• 2 years ago

Bitcoin would make an awful legal tender, because by its design supply decreases while demand for it increases. An ideal, 0% inflation currency (assuming that is ideal) would expand and contract automatically with economic conditions. Satoshi considered this problem but decided it was too complicated to implement, which is why he went with the fixed supply route.

Still, it's worth remembering that a fixed supply currency will inevitably fail just as the metallic standards (which were semi fixed supply) did, and for the same reasons: politics. Metal backed currencies fell because the political will required to coordinate the system fell apart. Newly-enfranchised workers didn't find the message "suck it up, the gold standard requires it" very appealing politically, so they voted for other things that entailed fiscal and monetary policy. Central Banks, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned gold en masse, with the US retaining it only for other central banks.

Bitcoin would have the same problem. It would be inevitably deflationary - halvenings, for example, are tied to computational power. Presumably, more demand for Bitcoin means more computational power, so its supply decreases just as demand increases.

Deflation is even worse than inflation for working people. Investment dries up, because why would somebody take a gamble on a business if they can keep their cash in their closet and make money, risk free? Employment therefore drops, while people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year? Additionally, loans get more expensive in real terms, wages decline, and a whole host of other bad things happen.

That's why central banks target +2% inflation, in part. Inflation is preferable because it encourages investment, discourages nominal (and only nominal) wage decreases, decreases the real value of loans to the benefit of the debtor class, and other benefits. Central Banks also have a pretty successful record dealing with runaway inflation - hike rates, cause a recession, wait - whereas they lack tools to deal with deflation. At its simplest, the solution to deflation is for everyone to get a check from the government, but this whole field is considered weirdo experimental land and has only barely been tested.

All that is to say: Bitcoin is fundamentally ignorant of history and is incapable of becoming anything other than digital gold. It has a floor value which it cannot sink beneath: online gambling, illegal things, and privacy advocates (in that order) guarantee it will never truly hit $0.00. But it would be an absolute catastrophe for any country to adopt as its actual currency.

Now that I think of it, Bitcoin is perhaps one of the earliest examples of technophiles assuming society should work according to computer code, thereby "cleaning" these imperfect human systems by replacing them with the inevitable future: A philosophically-driven (rather than pragmatically or empirically, for example) system, with clear and inviolable rules, limited to no exceptions, and a happy ignorance of why existing systems came to be. After all, why study the past when we're creating the inevitable future?

adolph2• 2 years ago

people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year?

Imagine if everything suddenly was infected with the Osborn Effect.

Otoh, certain products like TVs do seem to get better and cheaper as time goes on, yet people don’t seem to delay purchases. It’ll be interesting to see if conventional wisdom about deflation holds, should it come to pass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

kmeisthax• 2 years ago

Bitcoin has debasement, it's called altcoins and hard forks.

More generally, Bitcoin solves the wrong problem, because Austrian economics got the history of money wrong. Money wasn't invented to track scarce resources, money was invented to track who had paid taxes to the correct military invaders. The traditional / pre-money form of economic system (in the sense of it being a system to track the usage of scarce goods) is the gift economy. This is the system humans are built to work in. But gift economies are backed by strong promises of identity in close-knit groups. A bunch of rapacious murderers extracting food out of the fifth town they've sacked this week aren't going to be able to tell the difference between John, son of John, John, son of the brother of John, and John, son of the cousin of John.

What money does is separate a person's identity from their ability to access scarce resources. This 'paraidentity' of money is rendered in the most extreme in crypto. Your identity means nothing, just the size of your wallet, to the point where even voting in cryptocurrency is proudly for sale. The thing is, separating access to resources from personal identity also centralizes control of those resources. Printing money to fund war is not a bug, it is a feature.

In fact, it's not even something Bitcoin fixes. The primary source of liquidity in the Bitcoin ecosystem is businesses buying it to pay data ransoms. Bitcoin, in the name of opposing statism, invented a new kind of state whose military consists of hackers penetrating and encrypting systems to force you to buy Bitcoin to decrypt them.

The way you debase Bitcoin is by inventing new kinds of Bitcoin. Because, remember, the scarcity isn't the thing bringing liquidity into the system. If the ransomware people decide they're only taking Ethereum this week, then people are buying Ethereum, not Bitcoin. All money exists to pay taxes, and if the tax collector wants a different kind of money, then they've successfully debased the old money.

dnpp123• 2 years ago

Ignoring the half baked truths about Austrian economics (I'm not a fan of Austrian economics, but at least try to have valid criticism about them).

Bitcoin has debasement, it's called altcoins and hard forks.
The way you debase Bitcoin is by inventing new kinds of Bitcoin

Please read https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

reisse• 2 years ago

The primary source of liquidity in the Bitcoin ecosystem is businesses buying it to pay data ransoms.

Well, maybe you can explain then why most of the crypto liquidity is not in crypto itself, but in derivative products (mostly perpetual swaps and ETFs), which have no use to pay on-chain ransoms?

panarky2• 2 years ago

You should be very excited indeed because the future of your dreams arrived two years ago!

Since early 2022, the US central bank has been "unprinting" money. Their balance sheet is shrinking and the money supply is falling.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1rdgN

You don't need Bitcoin to save you from the inevitable war that's caused by an inflating money supply and printing money out of thin air because the opposite of this is happening!

The money printer has been replaced by a money shredder!

The end of war is a pretty big deal, how will you celebrate?

creer• 2 years ago

They would still have to go a very very long way to get back to even pre-covid level. In the meantime: propaganda.

thaumasiotes6• 2 years ago

How many wars have been started by the “print more money until it is worthless, oops I have to start a war to fix it” spiral?

Not many. The more typical case is that you're in a war, and you want to spend more money than you have, so you make some up.

ffgjgf12• 2 years ago

Bitcoin is basically the worst kind of currency I could imagine (well actually I couldn’t, if I didn’t know anything about it and someone told me to design the worst currency I can think of that would still be practically usable I wouldn’t be able to come up with something as bad…)

If due to some episode of mass psychosis everyone collectively decided to make bitcoin the default global currency it would result in the biggest economic/financial catastrophe in human history..

Extreme deflation, unlimited price volatility etc. but most importantly it destroys any reason for investing your money into anything potentially productive.

Why take any risk when you can just become richer and richer by hoarding cash?

Literally freeloading with zero effort whatsoever because you get a cut from anything that anyone does that might result in any economic growth (i.e. productivity increases -> prices constantly get lower -> if you’re an early “adopter” you just stay permanently rich with zero risk or effort). It’s basically if we just took some of the biggest flaws in our current economic/financial system and multiplied them by 10-100x for some insane reason).

Of course that whole problem is mostly hypothetical since there would be no real growth anymore and we’d just be permanently stuck in a severe economic depression…

It’s even much worse than gold/silver that was a compromise because no trustworthy and stable governments could exist in the premodern world and because economies were mostly static over multi-decade periods (of course there was still a huge amount or volatility year to year)

OriPekelman• 2 years ago

For those interested, the practice of debasement actually predates the middle ages by, a lot. By 301 inflation was so bad Diocletian had to put out a price fixing edict. It didn't work. It took Constantine's Solidus (basically solid gold coin - that will stay stable for almost a thousand years) to stabilize the currency. By the early fourth century the denarius that used to have 50% silver contained almost no silver at all (something like 1 to 5%).

thaumasiotes6• 2 years ago

Between the years 150 and 100 BC, the Seleucid tetradrachm went from 95% silver to 65%. As the name suggests, it continued to weigh four drachms.

Debasement occurs any time the government runs out of money and can force people to take the debased money. The previous ~150 years of the same government minted tetradrachms that were all silver, probably because their main use of the silver was paying foreign mercenaries.

By the early fourth century the denarius that used to have 50% silver

This is already a heavily debased coin. Nobody starts by adulterating their coins down to 50% monetary content.

It took Constantine's Solidus (basically solid gold coin - that will stay stable for almost a thousand years) to stabilize the currency.

This isn't plausible; gold coins barely transact (gold is too rare). Minting coins that nobody uses won't affect the currency that people do use.

Wikipedia notes that, on issuance, Constantine's solidus was worth 275,000 denarii. The denarius was debased, but it was also a coin that people carried around and used to buy things. Think about the number of transactions that might plausibly have involved one or more solidi. If we underestimate the 4th-century denarius as being roughly as valuable as a US penny... how much use would you have for a $2,750 coin?

qwytw2• 2 years ago

This isn't plausible

Why? Of course it wasn't accessible or particularly useful for the majority of people but it was central to the Byzantine economy/financial-system functioned. Soldiers were paid in gold (every 6 or 12 months so that simplified things) and taxes were also collected in gold whenever feasible.

Relying on gold as your primary currnecy of course wasn't ideal since the outcome was a partially demonetisation of the wider economy.

However while it was was basically entirely unavailable in Western Europe and there were almost no gold coins in circulation until the 13th or so it was much more widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Beijinger3• 2 years ago

It was part of the downfall of the Roman Empire

1. Not enough mines to mine silver, exhausted based on their technology

2. China sold silk and other stuff and accumulating silver

https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/03/peak-civilizati...

imtringued• 2 years ago

Ah yes, taxes on money holding and land, two of the most evil taxes ever invented.

The average citizen prefers paying income taxes, payroll tax and sales tax and VAT to the government and paying the land tax aka rent to land holders and the money tax aka interest to money holders to maximize the dead weight loss. Then they complain that the government is bankrupt and is doing inflation.

The average citizen is incorrigible.

lomase• 2 years ago

You are above all.

big-green-man• 2 years ago

It's just a way to bypass the cantillion effect and hoard the benefit of debasement for the lord. That's why he exempted the aristocracy, he had to cut them in to maintain his power.

So, suppose the ruler begins a debasement. You have a lot of coins. You take them into the mint and exchange them for debased coins but more coins than you had minus a cut to the king, go buy some asset that can't be debased like salt, wait and then sell it on the market after price inflation occurs. You benefit from the cantillion effect because you got the fresh minted money before prices rose to compensate.

Now with the extortion scheme, you lose that. The revenue goes straight to the king in the form of the tax, the king might make do with the same revenue as before, thus significantly reducing the inflation that occurs, or maybe raises his revenue to the match the cost to the economy before but now the aristocracy get nothing. To compensate, he had to exempt them or they would overthrow him, and now they get benefit in that regular people get directly fleeced, price deflation occurs but regular people don't gain purchasing power because it was their money taken from them out of circulation, but the rich people don't have that problem so their purchasing power increases.

Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

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