We all know what inheritance is...
Someone dies, and what are you supposed to do with all that late-person's belongings. They have to go somewhere right? Most of the time it just gets passed onto family members and used to pay for taxes.
When my grandparents on my Dad's side passed, I learned a hard lesson in this arena. One of my Aunts had basically stolen all the land and property for herself. She was the one taking care of my grandma at the time, and my grandma wasn't in a position to stop her from changing up the paperwork at the last second. Pretty messed up honestly; greed makes people ugly and stupid.
Another weird thing about situations like this are the taxes.
We can think of a house just like any other Non-Fungible Asset/Token. The value of the house is not known except when it is bought and sold on the market. If your grandparents bought a house 50 years ago for $20k, the tax owed on that property is whatever percent of $20k for 50 years in a row. Then when they die and the house gets sold/transferred at a value of $1M the property taxes are going to skyrocket 5000%. Aren't taxes fun and totally necessary this day in age?
What is money? What is value?
These are abstract concepts. Money is worth only what we think it's worth. If we buy an island with our crypto bags, does that island have value? Not really if it lacks infrastructure/people. An area of wilderness with zero infrastructure isn't very valuable at all, and building infrastructure is very time consuming and expensive.
We can think of money as our primitive reputation within society. If we have a lot of money that theoretically means we provided a lot of value for society and generated much more value than we extracted from it. This is why money is never going to go away. How else would we stop random people from simply taking whatever they wanted at any time? We'd run out of resources immediately if there were no checks and balances in place to prevent it. This is why banking exists in the first place.
Inheriting... reputation?
It's easy to see why inheritance is completely ridiculous when we realize that money is reputation. No one should be able to inherit a reputation or spend the reputation of another person. That's obviously ridiculous, yet it happens all the time. The entire definition of a dynasty depends on it. It is even celebrated in our culture.
People love this damn show
I haven't watched it (yet).
In any case, there's a very good reason why things have played out the way they have played out, but crypto changes everything. Without inheritance, what would happen to the value accrued by the deceased? It would basically get transferred to a centralized agent or a central bank. If the money in their bank account was destroyed, that value basically gets transferred instantly back to the central bank because the money is still owed back to them from somewhere else. Without inheritance, a central agent takes control of the value. We obviously can't have that.
With crypto, inheritance will be absorbed back into the community from which it came from. It's a completely different system. We are about to experience major culture shocks and entirely new philosophies because of this technology. Sure, it might take 50 years before it kicks in, but it will happen. I might even be around when it does depending on how crazy the advancement of medical technology becomes when toxic capitalism is no longer the thing that drives it. Everything changes when all that's required is that a community gains value rather than some random centralized agent needing to capture it.
It's hard to imagine a world where inheritance was against the law of the land (or at least very culturally frowned upon) but then again we have never lived in a society that was founded on abundance. Humanity has been in the gutter clawing at whatever it could get for thousands of years now. That cycle is about to be broken forever, and we'll have to find new problems to complain about.
Inheritance is irrelevant in an abundance-society.
Why would you need daddy's money if you already have millions of your own? We are so used to living paycheck to paycheck and never having enough that it's hard to imagine a world where throwing away millions of theoretical dollars is totally fine, but that's exactly where this is going. Money is reputation, and reputation can't be transferred from one entity to another just because someone died, at least that's what many of these communities will decide when we actually live lives that aren't riddled in scarcity and fear of running out of resources. Resources are abundant, and the distribution of them will be as well when crypto kicks into high gear.
Conclusion
Humanity is on the verge of a revolution. Abundance changes everything, right down to our very culture and mindset. Antiquated inheritance is only a tiny part of that future. Everything will change. Or more accurately, the more things change the more they stay the same. We'll just have to wait and see what the constants are. People will always be people, so there is that.
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Return from Inheritance will be 'outlawed' to edicted's Web3 Blog
