Here's an interesting paragraph from @BitcoinErrorLog

This is where Bitcoin-derivative thinking can become limiting. Bitcoin teaches us to think carefully about monetary supply, scarcity, and debasement, but those concepts do not imply that value itself is an objective quantity that can be preserved inside a sufficiently hard asset. Bitcoin can make the quantity of bitcoin predictable. It cannot make the future value of anything predictable.

This is in response, I think, to a tweet from Robin Linus:

I understood Linus's tweet to be about the importance of using Bitcoin as a unit of account as well as a store of value. And perhaps Carvalho is not directly taking issue with the second part of the tweet, so much as the idea of exchanging time with each other via money.

Economic value therefore does not originate in the amount of time expended. Time is one scarce input among many. Knowledge, circumstance, trust, scarcity, skill, ownership, relationships, timing, authority, and luck may matter just as much or more.

But I didn't take Linus' tweet to be quite so literal. More that of was expressing the way that pricing in dollars, keeping track of our wealth on dollars, denominating contracts and prices in dollars can still allow the fiat trick of intentional inflation to sneak into our lives.

Carvalho addresses this idea directly:

Inflation does not reach backward through time

This also changes how we should think about inflation.

If you worked yesterday and received $100, the economic event was completed yesterday. Your labor was exchanged for a monetary claim under terms that both parties accepted at that time. The value of that labor is not sitting inside the $100 waiting to be preserved.

If the purchasing power of the $100 later falls, the future terms available to the monetary claim have changed. That may be undesirable. It may result from deliberate monetary policy. It may redistribute purchasing power among participants. It may make the money a worse asset to hold.

But it has not reached backward through time and altered the exchange you already made.

This distinction matters because describing inflation as the destruction of stored lifetime implies that labor has some persistent objective value that money is responsible for carrying forward unchanged. Once we reject that premise, the issue becomes more precise: inflation changes the future usefulness of a monetary claim. It does not debase an objective quantity of past human time.

I found this to be a thought-provoking passage, however, I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. People use money as a stand in for many things, including, as Carvalho says, reputation:

money makes a subset of reputation transferable. It abstracts away much of the history behind a claim and gives strangers a relatively cheap way to recognize it.

And some of the usefulness of money is that it allows us to be imprecise with a lot of our thinking about decisions we have to make. Sure, we might be hiding some semantic or even logical problems when we think about inflation stealing from the work we did in the past, but one of the neat tricks of money is that it let's us get away with such crimes: I don't think it matters what it implies here, we just need money to help understand that holding an inflating currency is like holding an ice cube.

Nevertheless, I think Carvalho's distinctions are interesting:

A more precise description of saving is that we exchange present claims for claims on future reputation.

Your lifetime is not stored in your wallet. Your wealth is not a container filled with accumulated hours. Economic life is a changing network of reputation and claims, continuously evaluated by counterparties whose own circumstances, preferences, and opportunities are changing at the same time.