Fungible

I think it's great that you can turn everything into dollars, but there is sometimes a question of whether you should. One thing that has always seemed strange to me is that fines are essentially a punishment you can trade. Similarly, I've heard that the upper class in China sometimes hire people to go to prison for them, which is more ridiculous but only by degree. The danger is that when we abstract things into dollars they become fungible; interchangeable; without significance. Mostly that's useful, but I think that some things need to be different. Otherwise, what's the point? With software, as with money, it's easy to get so caught up in the abstraction you forget why you invented it in the first place.