this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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To be fair, Economics is half imagination and magic. It’s why something like bitcoin could even become a thing.
One of the main things I learned during my economics degree is that money is fake.
To quote Brian Brushwood, "It's just pieces of paper that we believe in."
The reason that you and everyone else believe in it is primarily because you need it to pay taxes, so the belief is not arbitrary.
Thinking of how I got here, reductively speaking:
I agree, but that leads to an infinite regress of your parents observering their parents, etc. My argument is really about the start of this chain.
Ah I see!
Convenience ought to have helped too! Though yes when the person with that monopoly on violence thing asks, you do.
You don't need Bitcoin to pay taxes, yet belief in it continues to grow.
That is true, but Bitcoin, like all other crypto"currencies", is a Ponzi scheme. Its value is driven purely by speculation, and the hope that it can be passed on to a "greater fool" for profit. This is true for a lot of financial assets, by the way.
You don't think secure time stamps are useful?
Lots of people don't have to pay taxes.
True, but somene has to, and they will create a demand for the currency. If I hear that Joe the baker needs money to pay taxes, and I want to buy bread from him, I know he will accept the government currency as payment for his bread. This in turn makes me demand money to be able to buy the bread.