because they don't control the physical paper that is money.
I dont understand what you mean by "fiat tokens". I don't imagine most people will accept tokens as a currency because they are as good hold of value and predictable as bitcoin.
In a token economy, certainly what you say is a possibility, but as you can imagine, that economy will be unsustainable so back to "regular" money.
But if I have a near magical genie who can make me anything - software, farming business, physical things - and at a fraction of economic input compared to the legacy monetary policy - then the money is worthless. As the Aztec shells were to the conquistadors.
That they can’t print USD is irrelevant.
> Money is a medium of exchange
That's an oversimplification. It comes with a lot of rules and authority that will be enforced by the issuing authority that a simple "IOU" on a sheet of paper lacks. IN the continental US, you cannot refuse to accept a dollar note. You certainly can refuse to accept the very IOU we agreed on a minute earlier.
Most of the developed world already has magical genies - certainly an overwhelming majority of people on HN earn enough to have LLM subs that build code, 3D Printers that print physical things.
The challenge always has been and will be humans.
You just cannot live in a vacuum. If you could subsist entirely on cheetos and figured out how to make an entire lifetime's supply of cheetos, after N days of watching Netflix, arguing on HN, raising chickens and goats, one day you will want to go and talk to a human.
Soon after, you will need a currency.
He just means it as in “credits”. “Fiat tokens” as in arbitrary units that are said to have value de facto by consensus, but don’t have any inherent value.
Yeah not the best choice of words in this context. And it’s quite a LessWrong-esque leap of reasoning.
But I do get the point: either Anthropic is successful and they transcend money, and thus (somehow) screw over their investors, or they are not successful. Their investors get screwed regardless.
Again, I don’t really agree with it, but it’s an intriguing point.