Interest is not rent, especially if you’re talking about a financial system in which there are a finite number of currency units. Interest doesn’t exist as money in the bitcoin system. Interest doesn’t exist in the fiat system as money either, it simply creates requirements and incentives for theft. Once introduced, it acts like a parasitic virus ultimately destroying the host.

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Jeff Swann's avatar
Jeff Swann 2 years ago
Idk what you mean by "interest doesn't exist as money." If someone can grant you access to a car or a house or a tractor & charge you for the time that you have access to any of those things, why can't someone grant you access to money to buy any of the above & charge you for the time you have access to their money? Who is going to stop this from happening? I do think there will be much less money lending & more lending of physical capital, like cars & tractors, because the value of saving & reducing upfront costs is higher under a Bitcoin standard. And the risk of loaning a bearer asset form of money is probably higher than loaning a vehicle which can be tracked & disabled & more easily retrieved by force. But lending is not inherently evil or destructive. It is just risky & prone to corruption.
In a pure fiat monetary system, a bond is issued by the treasury in exchange for fiat from the fed. If this is the only way money is created, then interest charged on this money can never be repaid with fiat, because the fiat money to pay the interest wasn’t created along with it. Make sense? It’s a trick to extract a forever cash flow at an ever increasing rate, consolidating ownership, necessitating higher prices, which requires more debt. Once introduced to a financial system, there is no stopping it. I view bitcoin as the antidote to this distortion. There is a transition period where lending will happen and fiat money will exist along side bitcoin, but eventually a majority will only want sats and nobody will trade sats for fiat, especially in a cbdc world.