Topic: Metarepresented Money (Read 2265 times)

Would you call someone who goes into a restaurant and orders a meal without having enough money to pay for it "a trusted member of the society"?

Perhaps its formerly trusted member...

You will go to the restaurant and say "hello I am a trusted member of the society, here is proof, I trust that you will do the best to acomodate me, let me give you some tokens of that trust"

Can I go to a restaurant and say: "I do not have any money, but I have loads of trust, so serve me your best meal"?

Money * is* trust. If you know that the world will end tomorow, if you know that central bank will flood dollars tomorow will the value of dollar be captured by exchange and volume, No you value the dollar beause you trust that a new day will dawn, that fed will behave.
How would you value your dollars if you knew you would be dead tomorow?

Money depending on trust does not mean its value derives from that. Instead, it derives from the proportion between the exchange value of all commodities and the amount of money available to express it.

Isnt it self evident?

But on a serious note you dont trust the dollars they are the token of your trust to economy, society, that the commodities you buy are up to your expectation, your employers will do their job etc, or if you like that god will not end the world tomorow

So the more you trust your ten dollars, the more they can buy?

Either something is money and buys commodities or it is a commodity and is bought or sold for money. Of course, anything can play both roles, but not simultaneously to the same person. People can believe they buy and sell money only because deriving monetary value from debt requires mistaking the future for the present.

For me money is a token of trust. The value of it simply is a derivative of the trust.

Money must represent how much of one thing people are willing to give in exchange for another thing.

Money has essentially nothing to do with how people decide what they want or need, and in which quantity, or what they are willing to give in exchange for that, and in which quantity.

I suppose you mean you reject it out of hand. The difference between money and other goods is clear, money is never destroyed by consumption, because it is not useful for anything, while other goods have mostly use value, and sometimes just a small exchange value. But the rules of the market, supply and demand and price discovery by trade, are the same.

You are one step away of eating money rather than food (and having a great disappointment).

You keep confusing the need for money with its value. The value of money consists in its buying power, not in how much you need it. Of course, if you have the amount of money Jamie Dimon has, then you can indeed change the value of the monetary unit, despite certainly not by just needing less of it.

This is fundamental, and a trader in money types should know. The market price is just the last price on the market of one of the goods (money) measured in the other good (which is also money in our case). It does not represent the value of anything except what is in the minds of those two traders at that exact moment, and the two have opposite opinion of the value of the two things, one of them thinks that the amount of bitcoins in question is more valuable than the amount of dollars in question, and vice versa for the other trader. The other individuals that are on the market, either with offers stated, or just waiting to accept a suitable offer, have completely different opinions of the value in the moment. Not even speaking about those that are currently not trading.

A businessman in general has to have some tool to decide if what he is doing is creating value or not, therefore he needs a unit of account. The value does not have to be completely stable for that to work, just reasonably stable. He knows that when he comes out of a set of trades with less dollars than he started out with, he has lost. For many types of business that is enough. If your projects have long durations however, dollar is not good enough either, you have to invent something like an inflation adjusted dollar, or use something else completely.

People are so used to the money that they do not see it, they don't see that any trade is two way with money as half the trade, and the money is some stuff you buy and sell also. It is about viewing it from the opposite angle, where money is the stuff in your focus, and the goods you trade is the payment. When we trade forex and bitcoin, we are driven to see it because both of our good types are money.

The value of money is not "formed individually," but socially. It is not just "expressed in the market," but decided by the market. No buyer can determine the price of anything independently of the seller.


You forgot to mention they can only charge you using the original monetary unit, the value of which is hence unaffected.

The value of the money is formed individually and expressed in the market. Basically each actor compares two things at the time and decides what is best for him at that moment. A nickel or a coke. Maybe you (mirelo) confuse it with the unit of account. That is something that is chosen by a businessman, and the crucial traits are fungibility and divisibility. By the way, a 10 dollar bill is not exactly as valuable as 10 one dollar bills, that you will discover, if you go to a bank with truckloads of money, they will charge you for handling the notes.

You are confusing the value of money with your need of it. Having more money cannot decrease the need for it unless the monetary unit maintains its value.

There is, of course, a standard unit of value: it is called money. You have just asserted that ten of those units are worth ten times more than one of them. Additionally, the price of anything you sell depends not only on your individual evaluation, but also on that of the buyer. So its value must become objective to both of you, precisely, as money.

There is no standard unit of value, it is all subjective, but you can make a rough compare of things with different value: a $10 bill has 10 times larger value than a $1 bill

A ten-dollar bill cannot certify that something priced at ten dollars indeed has this (or any other) value, so it makes no sense to define money as "a certificate of value."