this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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i do not know whether bottlecaps will work as a currency irl without state backing, in an apocalypse ppl will try to help each other out, and barter for real goods will be more likely than bottlecaps. the idea of a neutral market without a state deciding one thing to be currency (unit of account, ie unit in which all debts are measured in) from "double coincidence of wants" (the free-market textbook story) is very much unlikely. With real life wars, civilians use USD or some first-world currencies over some common commodity as currency (USD has external value and can be used to obtain goods/services from abroad). Or in WW2, PoW used cigarettes as currency because there was an excess supply of it (not everyone smoked) but smokers desire it, so you can get smokers to give you something in exchange, it worked in that environment.
I'm not denying any of that, I'm just making the claim that price formation of Bitcoin today (in a not yet post apocalyptic economy) works in much the same way for much the same reasons as the price formation of gold.
At least in Australia if you and your local community decide to create a "currency" token to make your barter system a bit more flexible the government will issue a cease and desist (if you're lucky,) federal police will come and arrest you and you can catch pretty heavy charges. I know a guy who knows a guy, their trade network was super local and tiny and they still got the whole jackboot.
They didn't need state backing to make their 90s era barter tokens viable. Governments jealously defend their monopoly on currency for a reason and it's not to protect the citizens. (at least not directly)
So it might not scale the way national currency and crypto do, but bottlecap currency is possible and so is any other so long as participants all trust each other to recognise and honour the value of the caps.
Also consider: prisoners using commissary items as currency for a more widely known example of alternative currency that works quite reliably.
True, but the token's value came from it being an IOU, being used to settle debts. Something like a giro, payment society. I think the state gets mad at such tokens because they can't monitor or collect taxes easily (even if it's in AUD).
I've been reading these two books 1 2 on the same.
I don't think an IOU (or a giro payment, if I understand them correctly) are quite equivalent to the token I'm trying to describe, since IOUs (and giro systems?) are only concerned with settling trade balances between two people, while the token(s) serve as agreed units of value which can be freely exchanged with anyone else participating in the micro-economy.
Agreed that it's basically all about taxation though.
I've been meaning to read Debt, have you read much of it yet?
Started last week, 1 & 2 chapters so far.
I assume it's a fairly compelling read? Graeber is cool.
Yep it's been fine. It presents the heterodox view.