Fiat literally changes because of supply and demand. This is why we have forex.
Now to answer the thread title, money was created in the place of trades. Remember when people used to trade animals for other food or jewelry and such? That's basically now, but instead through a piece of paper with a number on it.
Topic: Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - page 15. (Read 17699 times)
Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - while this is generally the truth is is also not the whole truth. Humans needs some form of easy exchange tool. Money is that tool. Bitcoin and gold, and any other precious metals and minerals are too. The only difference is the level of acceptance of certain payment method. While you can't pay for your grocery shopping with your gold ring, you can sell it in specialized shop. And that is the difference of acceptance.
Sure, universal acceptance is the prerequisite for a medium of exchange, and that is most easily done by government making a law or announcement. It is also easy to see why central bank won't use bitcoin as national currency, they just need to pass a law then they could start to print money for themselves. If they use gold or bitcoin, they will lose all that previlege
And there is a requirement for universal acceptance: It must actively flow in the economy. Crypto currencies might be superior, but if people have to convert their own currency into another currency and then spend, they need some strong motivation to do that on a daily basis. In this regard, the first mover advantage of fiat money as a medium of transaction is very clear
Luckily, with bitcoin you have that motivation: If every bitcoin investor first buy bitcoin and then spend on daily consumptions, then the increased monetary activities in bitcoin economy will raise the demand thus raise its value. Of course another motivation is to escape the fiat money robbery, but I guess few really have the urge to do that since the robbery is almost invisible and almost can not be felt
Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - while this is generally the truth is is also not the whole truth. Humans needs some form of easy exchange tool. Money is that tool. Bitcoin and gold, and any other precious metals and minerals are too. The only difference is the level of acceptance of certain payment method. While you can't pay for your grocery shopping with your gold ring, you can sell it in specialized shop. And that is the difference of acceptance.
Money isn't really the problem, it is how people tend to overvalue it over any other things. It is the greed of people that enslaves his kind, and money is just a medium on where Man can exhibit his greed.
Like George Carlin says << the World are fine, the people are fuc**ed>> and I think he has right. The problem here isn't the money but the people and for the moment there isn't a valid solution.
Money isn't really the problem, it is how people tend to overvalue it over any other things. It is the greed of people that enslaves his kind, and money is just a medium on where Man can exhibit his greed.
Like George Carlin says << the World are fine, the people are fuc**ed>> and I think he has right. The problem here isn't the money but the people and for the moment there isn't a valid solution.
It was people who invented the idea of money - a universal exchange medium that can exchange anything, and when that ability holds over time, it also becomes a store of value
The problem comes when some economists look at the fact that money is never consumed, and regard it as merely a token of exchange, then they had the idea of producing this token out of thin air to just meet the demand for exchange. This in turn gives the purchasing power of newly created money to money creator for free, thus the money creator step by step becomes the largest slaveholder, and they try to create any crisis that can make them print more money
It is the fact that some of the people can get money for free created slavery. If money creator need to pay equal amount of value to create money, just like a gold miner or bitcoin miner do, then there is no slavery, producing money will be the same as any other business
Money isn't really the problem, it is how people tend to overvalue it over any other things. It is the greed of people that enslaves his kind, and money is just a medium on where Man can exhibit his greed.
Like George Carlin says << the World are fine, the people are fuc**ed>> and I think he has right. The problem here isn't the money but the people and for the moment there isn't a valid solution.
Money or types of currency have been used since 700 BC. Since then it has been a way for people to fall into a certain social class and also so that everyone would not own a $500,000 house.
That is not correct.
Read Nick Szabo's groundbreaking paper about the origin of money (it is not that long, and it is a fascinating reading really!) http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html.
In this anthropologists, archeologists, evolutionary psychologist presents the facts that money, or money like instruments - they call them collectibles - were used no less than 70.000 BC AT LEAST, waaay before bartering or trading itself emerged from exactly the new possibilities money enabled. Without money (collectibles, - the ability to hoard and communicate wealth and "favors" among humans, THROUGH SPACE and TIME with moderate or no TRUST), so without money abstract there would be no civilization !!!!
Homo sapiens sapiens is the only species on Earth capable of wealth transfer between descendans and ancients through using money/collectibles/titles/deeds to pass on to their children.
Also, there are no "classes". Having 100$ per year as an income or 10000000$ is not a qualitative difference, it is a quantitative one, in principle they still have the same societal boundaries (right to own property given they trade it/laws to be obeyed by everyone), just less or more wealth doesn't create classes (you could not separate them anyway, a poor lower class citizen in the U.S. is probably still in the top richest 3% of the Earth's population. Good luck with classification and marxism
Slavery was the last "class society", where we had "zero income, no right to property (as the ground zero property right is to own one's own body!) at all" class (slaves) and "non-zero income with the right to have property" class (everyone else). That one is a qualitative difference!
About the 0.5M$ house: there are cheap and expensive houses because of scarcity of supply against huge demand, or vice versa.. Example. There is a fixed amount of housing that can be built looking at Central Park/Eiffel Tower. So those going to be more expensive ones because they can only facilitate a fixed amount of tenants which is a smaller number than how many would like to live there, price goes up etc etc. Supply/Demand.
In this example it shows perfectly why you CAN NOT eradicate money. Why? Because without it -aka it is free, how o you decide which 500 of those 62670 people who want to move in next to Eiffel tower actually does? Lottery? Violence? Would pure luck or strongest surviving ethically superior to voluntary exchange of marginal utilities?
No answer i guess, because money is just a conflict avoiding solution to a a physical fact that: time,space, and resources ARE scarce, and if demand>supply, somehow humans need to solve this equation (preferably non violent).
I have the impression that you don't understand what is fiat money. The problem is not the fiat, but who controls the fiat.
And this is not just a small problem, it is fundamental! People should understand, that as long as discrimination and rasism exists, we will be enslaived by others. And money will be just a tool to maintain our control!
Money isn't really the problem, it is how people tend to overvalue it over any other things. It is the greed of people that enslaves his kind, and money is just a medium on where Man can exhibit his greed.
funny thing is that humanity created the problem called "money"(they did it by giving value to something useless), and now they need it to be happy
this is why human stupidity is endless
this is why human stupidity is endless
I don't think that "money" is the problem. It's how people use it or exploit it that's the problem - and that misuse comes from government and regular people alike. Both can get into too much debt, both can spend too much, but can be careless.
The ability to use currency as a means to buy goods and services has allowed the world to go from subsistence living (i.e., creating what we need to survive, each of us individually) to more productive, specialized living. It's given us the advancements of science, math, industry, etc, that make the world such a brilliant place to live in.
Don't blame the tool that is money, blame the people that abuse it. And I'm not talking about the 1% or the 99%, I'm talking about irresponsibility.
funny thing is that humanity created the problem called "money"(they did it by giving value to something useless), and now they need it to be happy
this is why human stupidity is endless
Money was created to solve problems... it was unevitable to not create money, capitalism has given us the most development ever in history, the question is if money will start being a problem more than a solution once machines take over most of the jobs. this is why human stupidity is endless
funny thing is that humanity created the problem called "money"(they did it by giving value to something useless), and now they need it to be happy
this is why human stupidity is endless
this is why human stupidity is endless
Will you live without money? I think the answer will be "No". It is a big problem to resolve and I think it will pass a lot of years maybe centuries before that there will be a real "change". We need a real revolution, that has to start from the citizen (maybe better to call it not citizen but human).
Money is always going to be used and its actually a great concept and can work well. What doesn't work well is how it is corruptly issued by a central authority and I think that is one thing bitcoin solves with its decentralization. Maybe one day and over time we could transition away from fiat to a decentralized currency whether that is bitcoin or something else.
Sadly we live in such a world. This is why money needs to be separated from the Banks and government. This is where Bitcoin comes in handy.
One can get a pretty clear view of the situation if you take a look at how much money the richest people have combined.
One can get a pretty clear view of the situation if you take a look at how much money the richest people have combined.
In most of the people's mind, money is a standard unit of value. Just like using meter to measure length and using kilogram to measure weight, people use money to measure value
Many of us use money to measure work and we need money to measure that. One hour of a cleaner's work is worth less than one hour of a doctor. We need money for this use.
Will you live without money? I think the answer will be "No". It is a big problem to resolve and I think it will pass a lot of years maybe centuries before that there will be a real "change". We need a real revolution, that has to start from the citizen (maybe better to call it not citizen but human).
Great, that's the purpose of this thread: I want to research, what kind of thing can be used as a standard unit of value universally?
I have thought about many different candidates like air/water/food/time/energy to use as currency, but later I found out that value is all subjective, once you get enough of the currency, their value will drop for you
So the way to make currency's value stable is to make the demand infinite, e.g. make most of the people poor, then the currency will become stable
Or the other way: To make the supply side extremely constrained, thus no matter how small the demand is, the value never drops, just like those art paints and antiques
Another consideration: It may not be important to be stable, it just need to be predictable. For example, with bitcoin as currency, a long term appreciation against other things is guaranteed due to limited supply, thus people could easily reach a consensus about this character, then it can be used as a benchmark to measure value, since everyone knows that the value of this benchmark itself increase at a predictable rate
We can use whatever we want as a standard & universally unit of value. Remember that everyone has the right to issue his own money, I'm not obligated to accept euros, dollars, yen, etcc for my "service" o for buy and selling things ; this is the craziest thing in the state, you were born and you have accepted automatically all the rules of the state contained in the "social contract" this is not "democratic".
However I haven't a valid answer yet, but I have already explained my thought. Thanks for the attention.
In most of the people's mind, money is a standard unit of value. Just like using meter to measure length and using kilogram to measure weight, people use money to measure value
Based on proven economy theory, value is decided by supply and demand: More supply and less demand will decrease the value, vice versa. However, this does not apply to money: Money can be used to purchase anything, the demand for money can be regarded as infinite. When demand is close to infinite, the supply will not change its value in any significant way. So for average household, the money's value feels the same for them regardless of money supply
Based on proven economy theory, value is decided by supply and demand: More supply and less demand will decrease the value, vice versa. However, this does not apply to money: Money can be used to purchase anything, the demand for money can be regarded as infinite. When demand is close to infinite, the supply will not change its value in any significant way. So for average household, the money's value feels the same for them regardless of money supply
Money is a means to get wealth but not wealth itself. I'd buy some property with that cash and turn it into intrinsic wealth. Obviously most people don't understand the economics or ethics of money, but if they did they'd probably be outraged.
Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it
You could also say the same about god/religion.
exactly!
It's the demand for things that enslaves people to money.
Banks make money to...well...to make money, not to dilute the wealth of others! If I borrow money to buy a home or an education it likely increases my wealth. I only dilute my wealth if I make bad money decisions or fall to the risk I've decided to take.
Banks make money to...well...to make money, not to dilute the wealth of others! If I borrow money to buy a home or an education it likely increases my wealth. I only dilute my wealth if I make bad money decisions or fall to the risk I've decided to take.
We are not all slaves. Some of us choose to like the idea of collecting a big pile of money.
The big pile of money that you collected are just some numbers banks write on their book, the original ownership of these purchasing power belongs to banks who wrote it out of nothing. The more you collect those money (by doing various work or business activity), the more they write, that is the slavery
For example, I play a MMORPG, where literally all game money is created by the creators of the game at will. I play the game to earn game currency, does that mean I'm a slave of the game creators?
And real life isn't like that. Banks/government doesn't have 100% control like you think they do. If they print too much, they end up breaking a delicate balance, and harming themselves along with everyone else.
In a sense yes, you are the slave of the game designer when you play the game, since all your time and labor is used to exchange some tokens he can create infinitely, but you get some fun in the game environment as exchange (you typically get enough coins to buy super nice things that you can't find in real life), and you can give up playing the game anytime at will
But in reality, you don't have a choice, you are forced to play this game "life", and the designer of the monetary system decided that you have to use this token called fiat money. You work to earn some 100 dollar every day, and they print trillions to buy anything they want, and all those things are manufactured by people like you. Of course they have a limit to not cause heavy inflation, but give me the right to create money and I will invent hundreds of ways to put inflation under control without limit the money that I can print for myself
John nash said that ideal money would have some standard predictable and stable measurement backing supply of the currency token.. Something like an energy cpi or something maybe even amount of joules it takes to mine a bitcoin? It encompasses everything from harvesting the energy src to using it in the most efficient manor.
In this way it cant be hacked like the central banks do with inflation targeting.
In this way it cant be hacked like the central banks do with inflation targeting.
I've always thought that in the far, far future, when we can literally form matter into whatever we want, (i.e alchemy) the only currencies would be matter and energy, and whatever other basic component of physics that I'm not aware of.
Since those are the only things that matter, and you can make anything physically possible with those components. There would be no need for a token to represent values, since everything can have their values accurately measured by their worth in terms of amount of matter/energy etc spent on making it.
Jump to: