>Money is simply a belief held by a lot of people. A collective trance. Money is simply the distillation of a shared confidence in the future. This is the fund

>Money is simply a belief held by a lot of people. A collective trance. Money is simply the distillation of a shared confidence in the future. This is the fundamental lie used to market bitcoin. Money has nothing to do with beliefs. People are forced to buy dollars to pay taxes. That's the actual origin of money and what's it backed by. Because they need it for taxes, they start selling stuff for it and are willing (or even forced) to borrow it. Fiat currencies fail when backing enforced by the state fails: states try to demand more real wealth that they can actually get, whether because they are too weak to enforce it, or there's simply not enough wealth to go around. Gold (and other metals) was an early technology for state-backed money. For the first time since thousands of years gold isn't backed by any state - and the ancient meme 'gold is money' is already almost dead in less than 100 years. Bitcoin isn't backed by anything so it can't be money, ever. It's irrelevant how popular it is and how many people think it can work as money - billions of people can think magic works and yet it still doesn't work. As a group, bitcoin holders collectively lose money relative to everyone else - and within that group, early entrants gain at the expense of later entrants, ensuring it's eventually self-extinguishing. Without centralized force, only commodity money can exist: things that are useful in itself. The most obvious fundamental unit of value in the universe is energy which can be transformed into everything: maybe in the future intelligent entities trade antimatter packets, assuming practical storage, or some even better energy form. On lower tech levels it becomes heterogenous: shares/bonds, salt, seeds, oil etc, traded both directly and as IOUs. Just as hundreds of currencies currently exist, a true free market economy would have thousands of inherently valuable units being used as a unit of exchange, account and as a store of value, with popularity and liquidity varying both in time and location. Anecdotally, younger people are much more likely to get into newer coins/tokens instead of bitcoin - wealth transfer attempt by older holders is too obvious when it's something where 'they' generated majority of supply for themselves when you were only a young teen (or even a kid) and now tell you to buy from them because of reasons.