The main thing in money is trust in the one who issues it
In Russia, according to the long-known plan of the Central Bank, from August 15, the digital ruble entered the testing stage. And this fact, as expected, gave rise to a massive wave of conspiracy theories and alarmism in social networks.
Among the various apocalyptic predictions of digital conspiracy theorists, it seemed to me that the text distributed via instant messengers recommending not to sign on receipts, distributed through instant messengers, was especially interesting. Say, the signature on the receipt will be «digitized», which will allow using it to obtain your biometric data, while all the money from your accounts will be automatically transferred to a «blind trust trust», will become completely «virtual», so you will not be able to transfer them either in cash or in non-cash form. And all your financial transactions and life in general will be controlled by the Central Bank of Russia, which is not subordinate to the government (and therefore the state), and therefore will introduce a “social rating”, and thus you will lose basic human rights. But the message also recommends a way to combat the «digital Gulag»! It is necessary to abandon everything digital, then the system will not be able to recruit 51% of depositors and “fail like vaccination.”
This text is interesting with a cool mixture of beautiful, well-established meaningless phrases — “memes” associated with the typical fears of a modern Russian, an abundance of words written in capital letters, a lack of logic, a mixture of truth, half-truth and untruth, and complete ignorance of modern Russian reality. Who else gets receipts to sign? What does «failed vaccination» mean? Just Russia has shown one of the most successful examples of the fight against the epidemic. This text, obviously, is a typical example of psychological operations, and not even an element of information confrontation, but an element of the so-called «cognitive war», among the goals of which, not least, is to increase the nervousness in the public consciousness of the enemy.
Parsing such texts “essentially” is a meaningless exercise, since they immediately affect the subconscious, and even a rational explanation for the fallacy of each of the theses will not reduce anxiety. Therefore, I will not analyze in detail all the distortions and errors of this work. However, I will focus on the aspect of the document that seemed to me especially curious. This is the postulate that there is “real, state” money that has a full value, and there is “virtual” money, which is not only worth nothing, but definitely has a lower subjective value, since you cannot fully dispose of it, since they are in the management of a non-governmental organization, which allegedly is the Central Bank.
The text deftly manipulates the concept of «money», trust and the contradiction between security and privacy. Let's take the same «money»: we all know perfectly well what it is — «legal tender». They are given to us as a salary, we take them as a loan from a bank, and the state accepts them as taxes. They are a measure of the value of things, a method of payment, a method of accumulation and the main mechanism for the circulation of goods in the economy. Or do we not know?
Oddly enough, it would seem that such an important social phenomenon as money, which arose no later than four thousand years ago, still causes controversy among theoretical economists. There are at least a dozen money theories. Thus, Marxist political economy believes that money is materialized labor, and distinguishes between the value and the price of goods. Considering the history of money in a historical context, Marxist theory logically comes to the inevitability of fiat (not backed directly by precious metals) money in the development of capitalism. The Marxist theory is most likely right that there will be no money in the bright future. But, alas, it does not imply the appearance in our present of new forms of money and new digital relations.
The liberal theory of money, at its most vulgar, assumes that money is the result of a social contract. That is, in fact, anything can be money, it is only necessary for people to agree on what to consider as a universal measure of value. According to this theory, the state, with its money issue and «legal tender», is a deterrent that prevents the emergence of correct market «private» money, which in free competition will determine the best money. The existence of cryptocurrencies as money is justified by this theory. At the same time, as a justification for the possibility of the existence of money as a social contract, one single historical example is always given — the stone money of the Yap Islands. On this archipelago in Micronesia, an original exchange system arose, where stone disks from 10 centimeters to three and a half meters and weighing up to 4 tons were used as a measure of value. The stones were made from aragonite and calcite limestone, which are absent in the archipelago. In order to produce one stone “coin”, one had to sail 500 km to Palau, negotiate with local residents, paying them with their goods (mainly coconuts) for the right to receive a stone, cut down a stone disc and take it back to Yap. Note that, in principle, any inhabitant of the island could do this either alone or in a group. That is, the enterprise for the «issue of coins» can be called «private». At the same time, the final value of each coin was different. It depended on the size of the disk, the quality of workmanship, the age of the disk, and the history of origin. So, if someone died while transporting the disk, the value of the disk increased significantly. The disc was considered put into circulation if its location is known. In the end, most of the discs, once installed on the island, were never moved again, with multiple transfers of ownership of them. That is, liberal money theorists conclude, disk ownership was largely «virtual.» On this, the example of Yap Island money as a social contract and the world's first blockchain usually ends on a positive note. We see that anything can be money. And the monetary system may well be based on trust.
But the history of stone money had a continuation. In fact, we do not know how transactions and money circulation were carried out in the archipelago before the arrival of Europeans. What traditions and rituals it was accompanied by, who certified that a disc belongs to a particular person. We know that the very first European who settled on the island for commercial purposes, an Irishman from the USA, David O'Keefe, taking advantage of the gullibility of the natives, hacked into this stable financial system by mass cheap production of huge disks in Palau and Guam and, exchanging them for copra, very quickly became the «king of the island». O'Keeffe's efficiency in exchanging stones for goods caused significant dissatisfaction with German merchants in the region, who traditionally exchange coconuts and copra for beads, which in turn led to a military confrontation between the Spanish (the archipelago, by right, approved by the Pope, belonged to Spain) and German ships in area of the island. After a series of lengthy negotiations, all this led to the purchase of the archipelago by Germany, the expulsion of O'Keeffe from the islands and a ban on the production of stones by the new German administration. At the time of the ban on stones, there were about 13 thousand. The remaining stones today, which survived the Japanese occupation, when they were used as building materials, still lie on the island and are considered a symbol of prosperity.
So what does this historical example teach us? If desired, in this story one can find an occasion for lengthy discussions about trust in primitive societies and the modern world. I would draw this conclusion from this story: the modern state, which has more guns, wins in the end. The same Yap Islands until 1986 were under the protectorate of the United States, the most powerful state in the Pacific region. Be strong, and you will be trusted, and your money will be used in international trade.
Let's return to our conspiracy theory. As we have already noted, anonymous authors do not doubt the trust of Russians in their state. But if there is trust in the state, why should there be doubt about its legal tender, which includes the digital ruble? Fortunately, there is still enough time before the mass introduction of the digital ruble to explain its place in the economy, payment mechanisms and merits. After all, the latest social polls show that 58% of Russians are already ready to use it, and 25% are ready to transfer up to 20,000 rubles to it. That is, skeptics are already a minority.