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Why do they need paper money anyway? Is there something more legitimate about a piece of paper with many 0s on it vs redundant electronic storage of record?
by dickjocke 7y ago
Why do they need paper money anyway? Is there something more legitimate about a piece of paper with many 0s on it vs redundant electronic storage of record?
- boublepop 7y agoThey don’t need the pile of cash, and are free to burn it if they want and just write down in an excel sheet: “today we burned 2 billion euros”, now the question is if you’re willing to have your salary paid out in a digital recognition that you now own a part of that burnt cash, because you feel comfortable that others would allow you to pay using those IOU’s of no longer existing cash. If not, then the current system where the digital records refer to actual cash still needs there to be actual cash somewhere. Normally you’d have it in the national bank, but since they started charging it’s better to stockpile paper.
- dickjocke 7y agoThat's a very helpful illustration, thanks. I guess it seems...funny to me that the one level of abstraction (paper money representing the power to exchange goods and services) is so much more preferred to the other (digital representation of that power). Already now, most of my money is represented as a digital recognition that I own part of a pile of cash that I will never actually take physically.