Quote from: PeterGuinness on July 15, 2015, 09:48:50 AM

The reason why I had Ben buy the tree was to keep the example simple-- ie, it used only two protagonists. Obviously in real life there are maybe many other people involved, eg: Ben would loan the money from a bank as you pointed out. However, it is conceivable that such a situation as I outlined could occur-- eg: Ben bought the trees because Satoshi didn't need it all (all the wood was really worth 70BTC whereas Satoshi only wanted 55BTC worth), so Ben kept some himself for his own cooking, warmth, to build a hut and so that he could sell some to other people. In fact I know of a situation where something like this happened in real life. A while ago in my country some of the banks started selling of their physical buildings to investors with the condition that they be rented back to them, the bank even supplied a loan for you to buy them if you didn't have the cash.

Regardless of this though, the point I was trying to make is that the claim that it is impossible to pay off interest in a world that is based on a finite money supply is wrong. This example clearly disproves this claim. By-the-way, it is not the only way to disprove it, just one of the simplest examples. Another example that is easy to describe is one where the person who owes the interest pays it back with labour or goods instead of money. I didn't use this because I wanted to show that you could destroy the interest with "money" alone (where money includes debt in it definition).

You can borrow and bring back the BTC lended, even with interest, or in a pay-it-forward way, leaving out the BTC interest. It might work in a perfect world and a transparent one where everyone knows who lended who money and what to cross out in the end, but the world is too complex for this not to go wrong somewhere making it impossible to pay of interest, people hodling their coins till it reaches the moon, scammers, loansharks. We do not live in an ideal world.

I could go to my bank and say: "Hey, I have some debt, but I have made a nice drawing you can hang in your office, or I could wash your windows and we call it even right?" on which the bank will reply "yeah, 'right'. Someone call security!".

Getting paid for services is not the same as interest. Paying it forward might be, leaving the money where it goes and in a weird butterfly effect like manner it will somehow return to you indirectly. You cannot rely on that. Somewhere along the line it will get stuck because of a simple thing called greed.