this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
208 points (90.3% liked)

Technology

59612 readers
3262 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Num10ck@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

ok but why not gold or silver then? also obviously without currency controls all modern countries would have drastically smaller economies.

[โ€“] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

The settlement time. Gold and silver don't work well as currency if you need to settle over long distances quickly. So like I cannot send Amazon and ounce of silver to buy a product easily. But I can send them Monero with a few clicks of my keyboard. Almost instantaneously. Lynn Alden, who is an economist, basically says that the invention of the telegraph broke gold and silver as money, because transactions could happen at the speed of light, but settlement could still take weeks, especially if, say, the United States was paying, I don't know, the UK or something.