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Is there any truly hard money other than precious metals? If the internet goes down or partitions, then what happens to all those coins?

by dexwiz 5y ago

hffftz 5y ago
> dexwiz - Is there any truly hard money other than precious metals? If the internet goes down or partitions, then what happens to all those coins? If the internet goes down, we have bigger issues to think about?
jstx1 5y ago
No, precial metals aren't hard money either. The point of money is that it can't be hard. Money is a thing that you can trade flexibly for other things - for which you need consensus with other people about what's acceptable money. As soon as you start thinking about "what's really hard money", you jump over money altogether and land on "what goods can I trade for other goods".
- Capira 5y ago
  The core idea that I wanted to discuss is: If money is easy to debase then it will get debased a lot in the long term. That leads to inefficiencies in the market, and in particular to less sustainable behaviour of people and less sustainable societies. Bitcoin is just an example for an attempt to create hard money.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If money is easy to debase then it will get debased a lot in the long term. What happens to money in the long term doesn't matter much, what happens in the short term does. Investment vehicles short-term fluctuation matters less, but their long-term performance matters more. > That leads to inefficiencies in the market, and in particular to less sustainable behaviour of people and less sustainable societies. I see no reason to believe that the long-term smooth decline in the value of money does that at all compared to achievable alternative behaviors of money. In fact, one of the reasons money is typically managed with a goal of low-but-positive inflation with low volatility is that there is quite a lot of experience suggesting the opposite.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    Economies need a human-in-the-loop to adjust the settings every once in a while. That's what monetary policy does - it changes the money supply and interest rates as a response to what happens in the economy. Thinking that you can lock that policy in place once and let it run forever is naive - it just doesn't work in practice. This is why we don't have the gold standard anymore - it was a system so bad that it eventually broke and we had to move away from it. That's where all the talk about sound money ends - money has to be "unsound" in order to work in the real world.

Is there any truly hard money other than precious metals? If the internet goes down or partitions, then what happens to all those coins?

by dexwiz 5y ago

Is there any truly hard money other than precious metals? If the internet goes down or partitions, then what happens to all those coins?

hffftz 5y ago

> dexwiz - Is there any truly hard money other than precious metals? If the internet goes down or partitions, then what happens to all those coins? If the internet goes down, we have bigger issues to think about?

jstx1 5y ago

No, precial metals aren't hard money either. The point of money is that it can't be hard. Money is a thing that you can trade flexibly for other things - for which you need consensus with other people about what's acceptable money. As soon as you start thinking about "what's really hard money", you jump over money altogether and land on "what goods can I trade for other goods".

Capira 5y ago
The core idea that I wanted to discuss is: If money is easy to debase then it will get debased a lot in the long term. That leads to inefficiencies in the market, and in particular to less sustainable behaviour of people and less sustainable societies. Bitcoin is just an example for an attempt to create hard money.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > If money is easy to debase then it will get debased a lot in the long term. What happens to money in the long term doesn't matter much, what happens in the short term does. Investment vehicles short-term fluctuation matters less, but their long-term performance matters more. > That leads to inefficiencies in the market, and in particular to less sustainable behaviour of people and less sustainable societies. I see no reason to believe that the long-term smooth decline in the value of money does that at all compared to achievable alternative behaviors of money. In fact, one of the reasons money is typically managed with a goal of low-but-positive inflation with low volatility is that there is quite a lot of experience suggesting the opposite.
- jstx1 5y ago
  Economies need a human-in-the-loop to adjust the settings every once in a while. That's what monetary policy does - it changes the money supply and interest rates as a response to what happens in the economy. Thinking that you can lock that policy in place once and let it run forever is naive - it just doesn't work in practice. This is why we don't have the gold standard anymore - it was a system so bad that it eventually broke and we had to move away from it. That's where all the talk about sound money ends - money has to be "unsound" in order to work in the real world.