“Would appreciation and depreciation be considered a measure of the success or f

–“Would appreciation and depreciation be considered a measure of the success or failure of the media of exchange as a form of commons?”–

No, universality of demand, function as a pricing system, appreciation AND depreciation AND stability in competition with the time horizon of the production cycle (ability of people to plan everything from lunch to launching a major and complex industrial program) determine the value of a medium of exchange because it conveys information which is the purpose of prices – to convey information and as such permit us to engage in imputation.

What that means, in ordinary language, that the value of a thing is determined by what it will sell for despite the costs to us in it’s production, and that we must then decide how to operate our lives and our work and our businesses by consideration of the costs of goods we can afford to invest in an outcome given the market prices. So we organize mankind by the information included in prices and there is no other mechanism for providing mankind with that precision of information in all aspects of our lives despite the enormous complexity of the world we live in.

So there is a trope that money is a store of value, but that is only true within the context of production cycles – in other words a lease for 3 months vs a lease for 99 years. or the cost of purchasing groceries for a restaurant this morning vs the price they will sell for at lunch. Vs the price they might sell for in another season where such goods are not so readily available.

Reply addressees: @Aryayana83 @rosswcalvin @realJohnVictor