Isn't the whole point of money to save it?
Money does two jobs that pull against each other. It moves value between people (medium of exchange), and it stores value across time (store of value). The better it stores, the worse it moves: if your money gains value while sitting still, sitting still is the smart play, and Bitcoin proved where that ends.
The Alignment Economy splits the two jobs into two kinds of points instead of forcing one unit to do both badly. Active points are pure medium of exchange: fresh every morning, gone every midnight. Points you receive from others become Earned points, which persist as savings (managed by a daily rebase rather than expiry). You can absolutely save. You just can't save the allocation itself; you save what other people paid you for contributing value.
What does daily expiry actually do?
It makes the floor real. A billionaire and a minimum-wage worker wake up with the same 1,440 points, and the billionaire cannot stockpile the daily flow into a position of leverage over it. Equal allocation plus expiry means the floor is a floor forever, not a head start that compounds.
It removes the hoarding option entirely. No expiry mechanism, no velocity problem. Nobody delays a purchase waiting for points to appreciate, because today's allocation does not exist tomorrow.
It solves the cold-start problem. New currencies die in silence: no merchants because no spenders, no spenders because no merchants. Expiry forces day-one activity. Even two early participants must transact or watch their points burn, and every one of those transactions is data the proof-of-human system uses to tell real lives from fake ones. The mechanism that drives spending is the same mechanism that bootstraps security.
Has expiring money ever been tried?
Yes, and it worked well enough to get banned. In 1932, the Austrian town of Worgl, drowning in Depression unemployment, issued local money that lost 1% of its value each month unless a stamp was purchased. Nobody hoarded it. The scrip circulated so fast that the town paved roads, built a bridge, and cut unemployment while the rest of Austria sank deeper. Economists called it the Miracle of Worgl. The Austrian central bank called it a threat to its currency monopoly and shut it down in 1933.
The economist behind the idea, Silvio Gesell, argued that money should decay like the goods it buys; Keynes wrote that the future would learn more from Gesell than from Marx. The idea was never wrong. It just needed infrastructure that couldn't be shut down by one central bank, which is what a blockchain is.
The arithmetic of a day
| Morning | Spent during day | Midnight | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active points | 1,440 arrive | Sent to people, goods, services | Remainder burns |
| Earned points | Balance persists | Grows by whatever others paid you | Rebased, share preserved |
One clean consequence: the maximum any person can inject into the economy per day is 1,440 points. Influence over the daily flow is capped at exactly one human's worth, every day, for everyone.
FAQ
What if I'm sick, offline, or asleep and can't spend? Standing allocations solve this: you can direct your daily points automatically, for example sending all 1,440 to a spouse or splitting them across recurring commitments. Expiry punishes hoarding, not busy lives.
Can't I just send my points to myself or a second account? Points sent to your own account would simply become your Earned points and enter the rebase, gaining you nothing over spending them normally, and duplicate accounts are what the proof-of-human system exists to catch.
Is this the same as demurrage? Same family, sharper implementation. Demurrage taxes idle money slowly; daily expiry of the allocation removes idleness as an option, while savings (Earned points) are handled separately by the rebase.