In principle, he is giving charity to the rest of the holders of the currency that he destroyed. For example, if there are 100 people and each one holds 200 shekels, and one of them burns his 200 shekels, the purchasing power of the others will grow by about 1%. This is basically the opposite move of printing money by central banks or states. If printing money causes inflation and erodes the value of money for the other players in the market, destroying money causes the opposite effect. In my humble opinion, wasteful destruction applies only when someone destroys something with real value in the world (like an apple or fuel). By the way, even coins of the ancient world such as silver and gold do not have real value, only imagined value. For example, if someone were to destroy half the gold in the world, its price would probably jump by a factor of 2, or at least rise significantly. And vice versa.

That is not correct, because that adjustment happens only after a long time. Right now, when I threw 10,000 shekels into the trash, nobody can buy anything beyond what he could buy before.

I’m not sure it doesn’t happen quickly, because if someone refrains from creating demand in the goods/services market to the tune of 10,000 shekels, then the forces of supply and demand ought to change so that others’ purchasing power increases fairly quickly. That is, supply and demand operate in the market pretty quickly, like in the stock market, where if someone planned to buy a certain stock and in the end refrained from buying it, its price will be lower than it would have been had he bought the stock. Beyond that, what difference does it make how long it takes for the adjustment to happen? At the end of the day, nothing real was destroyed here, and the adjustment will eventually prove that.

Why should wasteful destruction apply to an “ability”? Does a person who burns a promissory note violate adding to the Torah?

Oren, I can’t see how that happens that quickly. It takes the market a long time to reach equilibrium. Like a thermodynamic system, all its relevant values exist only in a state of equilibrium. I explained that if a person throws a thousand shekels (or even a million) into the sea, nothing changes in the near term. Prices do not change and people’s purchasing power does not change. Only after a long time does the system rebalance.

Dan, what does adding to the Torah have to do with this? A person who burns a promissory note is giving a gift to his borrower.

Sorry, “wasteful destruction.”

But even if we say that it takes a long time, still in the end the total value in the system will remain the same. So why is there wasteful destruction here?

I do not mean to make a halakhic claim about the parameters of wasteful destruction. The claim is that his purchasing power was destroyed here, and therefore it is not proper to do this.

But when a person gives charity or a gift, or waives someone’s debt, he also destroys his purchasing power, and nobody would say that this involves wasteful destruction.

Because he is doing it for a benefit. Using something (deriving benefit from it) is not destruction.

So maybe throwing money into the sea is like burying seeds in the ground. Right now useful seeds were wasted, and a year from now something edible will come out of it.

Then cutting down a tree also is not wasteful destruction. After all, it decomposes and becomes part of nature/the soil and enters the ecological/biological cycle.

So you are saying that what matters is the immediate result and not the later one, and therefore cutting down a tree is destruction? And does it depend on the definition of the act or on the motive, and therefore that is different from sowing?
I would say that cutting down a tree is waste that does not rebalance, unlike sowing, which produces more human benefit, and unlike throwing away money, where the waste rebalances completely, though only after a long time—and regarding that I still have not understood why one cannot learn from “he went down into his fellow’s fields and buried seeds there.”

Ah! With money, in the end there was a lost period of value until equilibrium, and that is the wasteful destruction. With sowing, there too one loses a period of value, but the fruits that grow cover everything generously. And with cutting down, we lost both a period of value until it decomposes etc., and also real value, because the benefit already produced by the tree itself will not return. And from here a practical difference follows: if someone destroys 1,000 shekels, and suppose it rebalances after two years, and the interest on 1,000 shekels for two years is, say, ten shekels, then he destroyed an apple worth ten shekels.