[_vdpp]

I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).

[41b696ef1113]

The book Windup Girl [0] is a SciFi novel set in a universe where climate change has completely altered the world. Fossil fuels are no longer available, so production is limited by genetically engineered products or human/animal labor to charge in-universe batteries. Calorie cost of items becomes front and center to many activities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

[chrisweekly]

Really interesting book -- in part because the "calories as currency" isn't even its primary focus, rather merely one part of the backdrop. Recommended, for sure.

[celestialcheese]

Paolo Bacigalupi is fantastic if you're into eco-disaster sci-fi. The Water Knife[1] is also excellent, and with the extreme drought in the western US, feeling more and more prescient.

1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife

[beefman]

There's excellent theoretical and empirical support for this idea

How persistent is civilization growth? (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635

Can we predict long-run economic growth? (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102

Modes of growth in dynamic systems (2012) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039

Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (2013) https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554

Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis (2014) https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171

Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth (2015) https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015

Global wealth n years after 1801 (2015) https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185

See also:

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

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1441993975

[thriftwy]

In the Alpha Centauri game setting, energy is literally money ("energy credits").

[affgrff2]

And that's what PoW crypto currencies are: sacrificed energy.

[dredmorbius]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730923

[cryptonector]

Yes, but more like power than energy. The main problem is that energy can't really be stored, so energy cannot be saved like money can (sort of). So it is really power that money buys, not energy, and only supposing power is available.

This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!

[dredmorbius]

Stores of energy are frequently called fuels.

There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.

[brnt]

Always thought that currency should equal J/K, the unit of entropy. It's the one thing we 'use up'.

[dredmorbius]

There's a long history of this.

I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914).

(That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>)

The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics.

I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...>

My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves.

Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

[quasarj]

That would be interesting - but then how to rectify the fact that so many currencies have different values?

[zenon]

Joules can be converted to Bitcoin.

[dredmorbius]

Money is an exchange medium through which any transactable commodity, good, service, or asset may be exchanged for another.

The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.

[bowsamic]

Have you read Marx?

[contravariant]

Kind of interesting to note that 'work' (as in physical energy) and 'labour' use the same word in German.

[alangibson]

I was about to write a comment about energetic Marxism and the Energy Theory of Value

[hydrogen7800]

And, perhaps equivalent, I've long suspected that all wealth ultimately comes from the earth.