Hi everybody,
I can't speak English very well, but I want to tell you
why I believe in Bitcoin... in this way:
What’s Money? Ask a Taxi Driver! (I'm not the man of the story!)Some years ago, one of the authors of this book learned a great lesson about money from Russian taxi drivers.
In August 1989, as part of a group of American economists, he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in what was then the Soviet Union to discuss with Soviet economists some economic problems faced by both countries.
Taking taxis in Moscow to and from meetings and dinners was an ordeal. The author’s hosts had given the U.S. economists rubles (Soviet currency at the time), but Russian merchants and taxi drivers discouraged payments in rubles. Taxi drivers quoted
a bewildering array of fares in terms of U.S. dollars, German marks, or Japanese yen. And the fares varied from cab to cab.
When the author relayed this frustration to his wife, she explained that she had no difficulties with taxis. She paid the fare with Marlboro cigarettes instead of currency!
The author used Marlboros the next day (no other brand worked as well) and was able to pay taxi drivers with great success. He found that the taxi drivers could easily convert all major currencies to Marlboro equivalents.
At least during that period, Marlboro cigarettes had displaced the official currency (rubles) as the money most widely used by Moscow taxi drivers.
From: Money, Banking, and the Financial System, Ubbard - O'Brien - Ed Pearson
