2025-12-07 16:26:56

imagine showing up with a basket of apples, desperate to trade for some nails

but the carpenter? he only wants cheese

no cheese, no nails, you're screwed

welcome to barter hell — the legendary "double coincidence of wants" problem

sounds fancy on paper, absolute nightmare in reality

this exact mess is why money had to exist, why tokens matter, why we can't just go back to swapping chickens for firewood

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quietly_staking

· 12-10 13:27

Haha, really. The double coincidence problem joke always hits my funny bone... It used to be because of this trivial issue that transaction costs were extremely high, and only later did intermediaries become valuable.

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CoconutWaterBoy

· 12-08 14:14

Haha, this is exactly why the crypto space is so competitive right now. Something without consensus is even more frustrating than having no money.

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TxFailed

· 12-07 16:56

lmao the carpenter really said "cheese or nothing" — learned this the hard way when i tried liquidating some token trash for stables, except nobody wanted my bags. actually painful how this mechanic still haunts defi pools ngl

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SelfCustodyIssues

· 12-07 16:54

LOL, this is exactly why bartering just doesn't work at all. It's really a chain of pitfalls, one after another.

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retroactive_airdrop

· 12-07 16:50

Haha, isn't this just the liquidity issue we're facing right now, just with a different facade?

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QuietlyStaking

· 12-07 16:41

Haha, this is exactly why people in the crypto space keep struggling but still can't get around the issue of liquidity. To put it simply, it's just a matching game—nobody wants to hold onto something that nobody else wants.

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ZKSherlock

· 12-07 16:39

actually... the "double coincidence of wants" framing here glosses over something crucial about information asymmetry tho. like yeah barter fails, but have you considered what happens when *nobody knows* what the carpenter actually wants? that's where cryptographic primitives start mattering fr

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LiquidityLarry

· 12-07 16:31

Damn, this is exactly why a world without a medium of exchange is pure hell. I’ve been saying this for a long time.

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