this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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That’s not how money works. Fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally, which are discharged when the promissory note returns to its originator (in the case of dollars, the US treasury). Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.
Whereas I would prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist society, which is how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations, fiat currencies are used to maintain the modern (unimaginably huge) marketplace, whose ostensible purpose is to allocate scarce resources.
Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population. Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.
Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.
Graeber's book (Debt: The First 5000 Years) is so, so good.
For a large portion of time in those small anarchist communities, they'd raid and kill each other.
How would we prevent that?
You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.
I'm convinced the reason we have so much government is to control that portion. And it's not even doing that good of a job.
Exactly. Now they’ve metastasized into our government. Fucking orcs.
Lol, the debt will never be repaid with taxes.
That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.
You live in fantasy land if you think the US has that power, any government that tries this would be overthrown.
The thing is… the market disagrees with you. For now. But hey, put your money where your mouth is! I’ll give you a hundred rubles for a hundred dollars. If you really think the US government is impotent and on the verge of collapse…
Haha, which market disagrees? The bond market, the gold market, the bitcoin market, the housing market?
Since we are discussing dollars and not houses, that would be the FOREX market. The dollar is very strong at the moment.
So you don't even know how the bond market and the dollar are related, and you attack my personality when I show your argument is wrong, which you don't understand because you don't understand the bond market.
FOREX is explicitly the market that compares the strength of competing currencies.
I’m aware of how the bond market works. What is your problem with the bond market?
All money is ious? If you walk up to me and try to hand me money and I don't want it.. it's worth nothing.
No one forces you to accept an IOU, but that’s how “money” is created.
If you want a beer and have nothing suitable to offer in exchange, you might give me an IOU, which I then hand off to someone else in exchange for goods and services, until one day someone asks you for goods and services in exchange for the same IOU that you had used to buy a beer months ago.
These things actually happened^
Yeah, a dollar and a crypto currency has no difference but reputation now. It isn't backed by gold. They are both worthless gambles. The odds of variance is all your saying is different... Which is just reputation really
Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.
Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.
Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.
It's good you dropped the last part, because it disagreed with the first part.
Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.
So it disappearing would have 0 effect, and it disappearing would help the economy, don't conflict?
All stashing of currency is bad for the economy. If you put dollars in a mattress it is bad for the economy. I like that people automatically downvoted after, not even knowing what it was you deleted, haha
The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.
They wouldn't though would they. They would invest it in something else, as they already chose not to use that money for spending. (Unless they are using a visa card to spend that money). So that investment likely would be stashing it in a mattress, a bank, the stock market, collectors items, property or such. All having varying degrees of help/hurt to our economy.
Hell maybe they'd just bet it all on NFL games on Sunday. We don't know what they would do with it. But we know they already chose not to spend it.
Most of this agrees with what you said because I thought you said they'd spend it at first before invest. I just don't see the big deal about it. It's just legalized gambling, I wouldn't recommend anyone invest it it long term, but then again... Anyone who did so far made a lot of money, haha (this only applys to the major coins, the tiny ones like penny stocks are volatile as hell)
Edit: oh I've got an example. Baseball cards or what not. Someone can put 10 grand in baseball cards, and they could go up, could go down, but ultimately are worth nothing, just like Crypto. Why aren't people just as mad at the people buying collectors items?
Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.
Agreed, I don't get the stock market. I know how to invest in it but how can someone say it has value if in theory the stock can plummet while the business thrives, and the business can turn to absolute shit and the stock can thrive. Like right now Tesla's stock should be dropping. It's vehicles lost a large portion of buyers, sales were down in the first and second quarter of 2024, people say they may have finally been up in Q3 of 2024 compared to 2023, while "experts" are saying sales are slowing, and market competition is increasing on all sides, so future profits are in jeopardy, yet the stock is at the highest it has ever been.
Absolutely. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. No options (until 1973), no stock buybacks (until 1982), even the rules for short selling were different.