alt Hacker NewsHmm... do you not have a credit card? I often reflect on how paying with dollars seems so disadvantaged in today's economy. If you plan to pay back on time, why would you ever use dollars?
I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.
I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.
I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?
Where would that leave us?
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We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.
I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts. They're connected, but the former is more general.
I do think that the development of currency is intimately connected with the development of government. The core problem government solves is dispute resolution, and I would bet that the majority of disputes come from transaction where one side does not hold up their end of the bargain. In small communities you just have the tribal elders adjudicate, but as you start doing more currency transactions between mutually-distrusting groups that can't agree on their authority figures, you need a system in place for dispute resolution. Cue states.
My point is simply that currency comes first. State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation. To my knowledge this is historically accurate, and there are a lot of examples of currency spontaneously arising without a state to back it.
Hell, cryptocurrency itself is a good example. We now have a viable transnational, trustless, instantaneous currency. We do not have a viable transnational trustless dispute resolution process. And we very much feel the lack, because crime and fraud is rampant in cryptocurrency transactions. Currency creates the problem that government solves. Creating a government that can go along with cryptocurrency is an unsolved exercise left to the reader.