I don't think it is great analogy. You're comparing fiat money to illiquid hard-to-value startup shares that have a high probability of being worth 0 in relatively short term.
American Indians didn't believe in land enclosure and didn't have banks issuing fiat money against land, they also bartered I think rather than issuing paper against future labour.
I think hacker news isn't smart at all about fiat money because it's inextricably bound up with the venture capital world where you agree to hand over your labour for paper.
Fiat money is ex nihilo and therefore creatable in infinite amounts. Many of you won't be old enough to realise the productivity gains computers have brought. It's amazing. Yet here we are all scratching around for enough to cover our basic bills.
It will always be like this when you have land enclosure and tax labour. Create more and you can devote more to land costs. Hurry up, the rentiers are waiting.
Simplicity is kinda nice, but it's not very indicative of a good solution all the time.
Especially given the counterintuitive results behind fiat currencies and the relatively low correlation between all the moving parts, it's difficult to even say if the simpler model is better because the complicated model has so many side effects.
I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike.
The transition away from the gold standard and years of living in a post-gold-standard world show that fiat is a totally reasonable system of money. I'd love to see you support or justify your claims, so we can at least debate from a basis of shared understanding and fact instead of hyperbole. Your statement is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
the history of money seems to be lost on you. It literally went through the same sorts of things. Fiat works because we learned. My Good that gun comparison was dumb.
That's such a crude reductionist argument that I can smell the sent of arrogance and mockery, and I am not sure if response is warranted.
Especially since your simile has rather gaping holes in it.
Actually thinking about it... ironically your example is better description of fiat currency than btc.
Use low resource output to generate cheap tokens that will be loosely tracked by 'One True Government', and people agree that they have value. People can exchange it for goods and even can go back to the 'One True Government' to exchange their gold back token back to gold... oh wait... right we got rid of that whole gold backing while back...
Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property.
Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash.
If I build a house there is more value in the world, so there should be more paper money too - without affecting inflation. This is what happens with fiat money.
On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - you can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad.
Gold money does not, and can not work unless you are in a static economy. Fiat money works in both cases.
Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead.
Fiat money has been around not even 200 years while various commodities used in coins worked fine for much longer. Oh but to you it isn't convenient somehow and this is "unarguably correct", lol whatever, spoken like a true state apologist I guess. Go on believing your own alternate history where the force and fraud of government are pretended away.
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