My best (stupid) guess is weapons. US gov has a ton of weapons. Already sells tons of weapons. Now the prices will always remain stable. Other countries would love to know that 30 million usd would always be able to buy an f15. Other countries declaring war will increase the value of the USD, as buying weapons from us government will decrease amount of money in circulation.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I’d base it off of love and compassion, and instantly watch the value sink to the negatives.

      • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        And then you ask yourself, is it possible to game the sociopath into working for humanity instead of against it?

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    If you want a non-fiat currency, you want the backing thing to:

    • Not be easily produced/obtained, and to have a fairly predictable cost of production/obtaining.

    • Be fairly-rare, so that it can be value-dense, to reduce storage and transportation costs.

    • Not degrade.

    • Be hard to counterfeit.

    • It would be nice if it were divisible.

    • Not have much by way of critical non-backing uses, so that its use here doesn’t distort that.

    Probably gold. It ticks pretty much all the boxes; there’s a reason that it was used in the past.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The big problem for me was something Ben Bernanke said: the process of taking gold out of a hole in the ground (a mine) just to put it into a different hole in the ground (a vault) is a pretty terrible waste of resources. And you need to continue mining it in order to stave off deflation, which means you have to keep doing that forever; and eventually that’s just not going to work anymore. Mining gold is only going to become more expensive as time goes on.

      Not to mention, our economy is too big and moves too quickly for gold to be a moderating force to inflation anymore. The numbers are just too big and moving too fast; we need a more nimble lever, and right now interest rates are a pretty good one.

      All of that to say, there’s a reason every country has come off of the gold standard since the mid- to late-20th century.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        All of that to say, there’s a reason every country has come off of the gold standard since the mid- to late-20th century.

        Because controlled inflation is necessary for an economy to function and nothing but a fiat currency has the desired characteristics.

        Gold is still the best option if you insist on having the currency backed.

      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        Sure taking gold out of a hole to put it in a different hole is a waste of resources but there’s kind of a driving force towards that because if the currency is actually useful then people aren’t going to use it as currency and if it’s easy to produce they’re going to counterfeit it

        Same with cryptocurrencies, they’re hard to produce and functionless, so a huge waste of resources, and frankly same with (high frequency) trading of stocks, as you don’t own them when the dividends are paid yet you put huge resources into them because other people want them because of their inherent value

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          But doing something just for the sake of finances…it doesn’t add anything to the world. The original question was “what do you pick?” and I don’t like the idea of picking an energy-intensive activity that doesn’t help the world in any way.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      I mean we would use gold in electronics a lot more if it wasn’t considered valuable. So it’s not perfect because it actually has a wonderful use outside of being valuable.

      Rather unlucky society picked gold and silver to he valuable with how useful they.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        That’s what inflation is and why governments target a low but positive level of inflation with monetary policies. The fact that your dollar slowly loses value pushes you to reinvest it. Very few rich people are just sitting on piles of cash.

        • mrcleanup@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          If they didn’t also aggressively suppress increases to minimum wage and tax recapture benefits, I might agree, but in the long run inflation does more to devalue labor than it does to mitigate hoarding.

  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 months ago

    I mean the hack which leads to the best result would be pegging it to the Euro, Pound or Yen as a strong currency controlled by a US ally

    That said, backing it with recaptured pollutants or something would be interesting as although it has no inherent value, that’s no different to how it is currently and it’d be interesting to see the mechanics of how people act

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
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      9 months ago

      Seeing heads explode because of USD and StableCoins both being pegged to EACH OTHER… yeah, I can get behind that. I’ll bring popcorn for you too.

  • PoliticallyIncorrect@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    No way to back any currency anymore. So I choose to be backed as is by a bunch of manmade zeros into a computer network.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    9 months ago

    Maybe people. A country with lots of people should at least in theory be capable of achieving the most “stuff”. You already rent people for a limited amount of time when you employ them.

    • towerful@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      God, imagine a country going into irrevocable debt and having to actually export people.
      Also, currency would fluctuate wildly as people immigrate/emmigrate.
      Do you count tourists? Illegal immingrants? Legal, but not sovreign, citizens (or whatever the term is for someone working in a country on a visa)?
      What if people fudge their measurements?
      Does put a direct price on war, i guess.

  • Pyro@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Other countries declaring war will increase the value of the USD, as buying weapons from us government will decrease amount of money in circulation.

    I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding this, but wouldn’t that decrease the value of the dollar?

    If the US Gov owns less weapons (because they’ve been sold) but the populace has the same number of dollars, then the value of those dollars must be decreased because there are less weapons backing it.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      Well to get the thing that is backing the dollar, they would have to turn in us dollars that would be taken out of circulation . So a bunch of countries at the same time would get a bunch of USD and turn them in.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      So the more money you have, the more freedom you have?..

      I think it already works like that.

      • TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        No, the more freedom America has, the more value American currency has. Our currency would be backed by freedom and eagle sounds, not the other way around.