14 ms·

I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's f

by t43562 5y ago

I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or anything. "Save your money." These were Zimbabwe dollars, however, and in the late 1990s it all inflated away to nothing. So much for conscientious saving.

supersync 5y ago
Thanks for sharing. A book “The Psychology of Money” talks about this. How people handle money (successful or not) is very different depending on whether or not they experienced inflation as a child.
Bolkan 5y ago
xiphias2 5y ago
I did the same thing for many years, until in 2013 the Cyprus bailouts woke me up...at that point I went all in on Bitcoin out of anger of the banking system, and haven't changed anything since.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.
  - WanderPanda 5y ago
    In fact it is „more stable than some national currencies“
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another internet service (or even banking service) with the same stability. Also the same software that I downloaded in 2013 still works (although I'm not using it, I have the option to not upgrade). There was a bail in last month in my country (Hungary) as well: all people who stored their money in Russian banks lost their money over $100000, just like in Cyprus in 2013. They did't even know that their bank was Russian owned. I'm not playing the game of russian roulette with my money anymore.
    - kkdaemas 5y ago
      The problem is Bitcoin Core may have (will have) unknown vulnerabilities and those might not get patched correctly once discovered.
      - xiphias2 5y ago
        Yes, this is true, I'm mostly worried about the elliptic curve signature part, as everything else could be fixed with an emergency hard fork (except SHA256). Sadly OP_CAT operation is disabled (or substring equality operation), which would make lamport signatures available again for high value transactions. I would love it if lamport signatures would be enabled again (it would be quite easy to do), but I'm afraid that there isn't enough concensus to do it at this point, because some people would think that it's wasteful, and also lamport signatures are dangerous, as they can be used only once.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      Well, I've had BTC transactions drop out of the mempool (so, they were not executed, but you don't know that immediately, you only know days later), and transactions that worked took between a few minutes and more than half a day. The fees ranged from virtually nothing to around 50 USD. I certainly would not call that predictable and stable. I mean, you don't even know when the next block will arrive.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    According to legendary quant Nassim Nicholas Taleb so called cryptocurrencies are so fundamentally volatile that they cannot be considered currencies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204
    - ttoinou 5y ago
      Parents didnt call it a currency..
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Bitcoin is an unbelievably stable platform with an uptime of 99.98% with only 13 years to draw from. It's been sticking with it's algorithmically defined inflation rate with perfect predictability, unlike any other currency or scarce asset like gold, which depends heavily on incentives to mine and accessible reserves. Don't mistake the volatility of the USD price of bitcoin (which is based on the erratic, unpredictability of human emotions and massively distrusted market decision making) with the complete and utter lack of volatility of the actual underlying system.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      The mathematical certainty of the issuance of BTC won't really mean much if nobody wants to trade it for goods. BTC's volatility is not just volatility w.r.t. USD.
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        The value of anything as a medium of exchange and store of value always depends entirely on whether or not a critical mass of people want to use it as such. Once you establish that a thing satisfies all the properties of money, or close enough, then the only question is network effect. Even if minor theoretical improvements could be made, it has to be 10-100x better to overcome runaway network effect. Sea shells and bags of salt were drastically better money than mentally keeping track of favors owed in a small tribe, because we could expand our exchange of favors beyond dunbar's number to cooperate with people we don't intimately know. Gold was much better than sea shells and salt because it's globally scarce and durable. Paper backed by gold was much better than raw gold, namely because it is drastically easier to trade, transport, and fractionalized. The technical nature of bitcoin isn't special and it can be trivially forked, modified, and a new network started for near zero cost. That's exactly what coins like litecoin and dogecoin did. Copy paste bitcoin code, change the name and some constants, and boom, new money. What makes bitcoin special, and why there can only be one dominant cryptocurrency long term, is network effect. I don't care about litecoin and dogecoin, because barely anyone uses them relative bitcoin. Barely anyone is developing and building on them as a foundational layer. The only reason anyone cares about dogecoin these days is because one eccentric billionaire has a hard on for it, and that's way too small of a bus number to store a significant amount of my wealth in. The same holds true for any network protocol. I can copy paste libraries for TCP and make modifications that I think will make it far superior to the current form and release it to the world! And nobody except hobbyists will use it because standard TCP has an unassailable network effect. You have to have an extraordinarily compelling reason to change, and even then it will take decades (see IPv4 to v6 transition for example). The thing about bitcoin, is that it is the first truly digital money. Fiat currencies like the USD have been trying for decades to pretend to be digital, and they'll probably try harder to use blockchains to make it better, but ultimately it's still fundamentally stuck with an analog foundation defended by guns and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, which makes it globally weak relative to bitcoin. That's why bitcoin has a 10-100x advantage over dollars long term. It's natively digital, open, and permissionless from day one.
- throwawaybsd 5y ago
  Pff tell me about it. I made the choice of buying real estate instead. My tenant has everything serviced for them. They lost half on the stock market, but fortunately own crypto. Also lost a bit on crypto but they earn plenty. My estate doubled in 10 years and the rent they pay paid for two more properties, but i have to deal with the hassle of fixing pipes and such - all in all i pay in maintenance a month worth of rent, but the stress of calling contractors is too much - sometimes i need to get my arse out of the pool to dial people. Also have to spent few hours total a year. I just cant. Should sell everything and invest in crypto. My Porsche is too boring - need a lambo so it loses value sooner. After all what else can you do other than keep money in the bank. Buy estates and turn highly paid tech serfs into tenants? Hah. Best chase nfts.
throwuxiytayq 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y ago
  MMT-caused inflation just an effect of an alternative to taxation and is an effective means to keep spending moving. Like any other outcome of monetary policy it has winners and losers
- Certhas 5y ago
  I looked up the definitions: Theft: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property. Inflation: a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services. There you go, proved you wrong.
  - spawarotti 5y ago
    I think they meant that "a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services." is theft.
  - ehejdud 5y ago
  - zmgsabst 5y ago
    In definition 1: > as by embezzlement In definition 2: > attributed to … volume of money and credit We’d be able to conclude that “inflation is theft” from noting that inflation is driven by “printing money”, whether paper or credit, and that the benefits illicitly go to those in control of the financial system to the detriment of others — which the other poster would likely characterize as “embezzlement”. So you proved that person right — at least to people who view the Federal Reserve and large banks as in a self interested cabal. By embezzling the funds they print, eg giving special access to friends, they engage in theft towards society at large.
Certhas 5y ago
As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25. Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.
- Taek 5y ago
  It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.
  - Jiro 5y ago
    Learning to manage money includes making correct decisions about whether a course of action is worth it. Forcing a child to save when he'd be better off not saving teaches the right lesson about what saving is, and the wrong lesson about when you should save.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      Not saving comes natural to most people. Learning to save is the hard part. Most children don't ever make enough money that saving would make financial sense. The reality is, teaching kids to save their money is more a lesson in delayed gratification than it is a financial lesson.
      - makeitdouble 5y ago
        This is true for many children, but there’s a also a lot of kids who are too afraid to spend and enjoy their money. It is I think as important to teach children how to spend their money, on what, and get them used to understand how much they got for their money. As a kid I saved for a long time to buy an Atari Jaguar, and it was a eye opener looking back at the “sacrifices” I made for that result.
  - 5y ago
kingcharles 5y ago
Funny side note: the State of Illinois spent a decent amount of public funds trying to decide whether to charge me with $100 trillion in currency fraud. The state crime lab said the currency I owned was the "most sophisticated piece of currency forgery" they had ever encountered. It was a single (real) $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe that I carried in my wallet for fun. I assume they thought for some reason it was US dollars? https://www.banknoteworld.com/zimbabwe-currency/100-trillion-zimbabwe-dollars/ https://www.banknoteworld.com/zimbabwe-currency/100-trillion...
- chiph 5y ago
  I bought a couple of those and got them framed as a gift. The owner of the frame shop was concerned about me leaving them with him, until I pointed out that I was going to pay him more for the frame than they were worth.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  Did they at least give it back to you? I don't know how much they sell for now, but I was lucky to get one for $20 when they were normally going for $40 on eBay. I forgot the exact result, but I once calculated the value of a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill when it was printed, and it came to something like 0.06 USD (6 cents).
  - Jiro 5y ago
    I just checked ebay. Real ones sell for $100-200 US. There are also fakes, most of which admit in the description that they are fakes, and include extremely large numbers like 10^33. The highest number that you can get cheaply and that is not fake seems to be the 50 billion. They sell for about five dollars, which given the economics of ebay is probably as low as you can expect.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The one trillion ones are more rare, as Germany if I recall correctly stopped printing them for Zimbabwe soon afterwards. At one point I had a hundred stack of them somewhere.
vmception 5y ago
Should taught you how to dollar cost average on assets instead of just hoard the currency Maybe next gen parents will
anonporridge 5y ago
Never store your long term savings in a thing that someone who isn't you and never will be you can theoretically print an infinite amount of. Even if you completely trust the people in charge today, you just can't ever be certain that they'll be in charge forever or that the environment won't change in a way such that they break your trust.
throwawaybsd 5y ago
magicalhippo 5y ago
My parents encouraged me to save money, but for my birthdays so I could buy a new cool Lego kit. My parents and relatives would chip in on the day, but I would keep count during the year to make sure I was close enough. Looking back I think that was a good middle ground. At least as a 5-10 year old it was a quite concrete target yet also showed me the benefits of saving money.
tempestn 5y ago
I try to teach my kids two lessons around money. One, don't spend all of your money. Save some of it. Basically get in the habit of having some amount of money without feeling the need to spend it. Two, when you do have an amount of money that you're not spending, invest it with broad diversification. That lesson is obviously are more complex one that comes later, but it's a likewise important piece. Both to avoid the money inflating away, but also to avoid conflating the ideas of investment and speculation.

by t43562 5y ago

supersync 5y ago

Thanks for sharing. A book “The Psychology of Money” talks about this. How people handle money (successful or not) is very different depending on whether or not they experienced inflation as a child.

Bolkan 5y ago

xiphias2 5y ago

I did the same thing for many years, until in 2013 the Cyprus bailouts woke me up...at that point I went all in on Bitcoin out of anger of the banking system, and haven't changed anything since.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  In fact it is „more stable than some national currencies“
- xiphias2 5y ago
  If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another internet service (or even banking service) with the same stability. Also the same software that I downloaded in 2013 still works (although I'm not using it, I have the option to not upgrade). There was a bail in last month in my country (Hungary) as well: all people who stored their money in Russian banks lost their money over $100000, just like in Cyprus in 2013. They did't even know that their bank was Russian owned. I'm not playing the game of russian roulette with my money anymore.
  - kkdaemas 5y ago
    The problem is Bitcoin Core may have (will have) unknown vulnerabilities and those might not get patched correctly once discovered.
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      Yes, this is true, I'm mostly worried about the elliptic curve signature part, as everything else could be fixed with an emergency hard fork (except SHA256). Sadly OP_CAT operation is disabled (or substring equality operation), which would make lamport signatures available again for high value transactions. I would love it if lamport signatures would be enabled again (it would be quite easy to do), but I'm afraid that there isn't enough concensus to do it at this point, because some people would think that it's wasteful, and also lamport signatures are dangerous, as they can be used only once.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    Well, I've had BTC transactions drop out of the mempool (so, they were not executed, but you don't know that immediately, you only know days later), and transactions that worked took between a few minutes and more than half a day. The fees ranged from virtually nothing to around 50 USD. I certainly would not call that predictable and stable. I mean, you don't even know when the next block will arrive.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  According to legendary quant Nassim Nicholas Taleb so called cryptocurrencies are so fundamentally volatile that they cannot be considered currencies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204
  - ttoinou 5y ago
    Parents didnt call it a currency..
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Bitcoin is an unbelievably stable platform with an uptime of 99.98% with only 13 years to draw from. It's been sticking with it's algorithmically defined inflation rate with perfect predictability, unlike any other currency or scarce asset like gold, which depends heavily on incentives to mine and accessible reserves. Don't mistake the volatility of the USD price of bitcoin (which is based on the erratic, unpredictability of human emotions and massively distrusted market decision making) with the complete and utter lack of volatility of the actual underlying system.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    The mathematical certainty of the issuance of BTC won't really mean much if nobody wants to trade it for goods. BTC's volatility is not just volatility w.r.t. USD.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      The value of anything as a medium of exchange and store of value always depends entirely on whether or not a critical mass of people want to use it as such. Once you establish that a thing satisfies all the properties of money, or close enough, then the only question is network effect. Even if minor theoretical improvements could be made, it has to be 10-100x better to overcome runaway network effect. Sea shells and bags of salt were drastically better money than mentally keeping track of favors owed in a small tribe, because we could expand our exchange of favors beyond dunbar's number to cooperate with people we don't intimately know. Gold was much better than sea shells and salt because it's globally scarce and durable. Paper backed by gold was much better than raw gold, namely because it is drastically easier to trade, transport, and fractionalized. The technical nature of bitcoin isn't special and it can be trivially forked, modified, and a new network started for near zero cost. That's exactly what coins like litecoin and dogecoin did. Copy paste bitcoin code, change the name and some constants, and boom, new money. What makes bitcoin special, and why there can only be one dominant cryptocurrency long term, is network effect. I don't care about litecoin and dogecoin, because barely anyone uses them relative bitcoin. Barely anyone is developing and building on them as a foundational layer. The only reason anyone cares about dogecoin these days is because one eccentric billionaire has a hard on for it, and that's way too small of a bus number to store a significant amount of my wealth in. The same holds true for any network protocol. I can copy paste libraries for TCP and make modifications that I think will make it far superior to the current form and release it to the world! And nobody except hobbyists will use it because standard TCP has an unassailable network effect. You have to have an extraordinarily compelling reason to change, and even then it will take decades (see IPv4 to v6 transition for example). The thing about bitcoin, is that it is the first truly digital money. Fiat currencies like the USD have been trying for decades to pretend to be digital, and they'll probably try harder to use blockchains to make it better, but ultimately it's still fundamentally stuck with an analog foundation defended by guns and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, which makes it globally weak relative to bitcoin. That's why bitcoin has a 10-100x advantage over dollars long term. It's natively digital, open, and permissionless from day one.
throwawaybsd 5y ago
Pff tell me about it. I made the choice of buying real estate instead. My tenant has everything serviced for them. They lost half on the stock market, but fortunately own crypto. Also lost a bit on crypto but they earn plenty. My estate doubled in 10 years and the rent they pay paid for two more properties, but i have to deal with the hassle of fixing pipes and such - all in all i pay in maintenance a month worth of rent, but the stress of calling contractors is too much - sometimes i need to get my arse out of the pool to dial people. Also have to spent few hours total a year. I just cant. Should sell everything and invest in crypto. My Porsche is too boring - need a lambo so it loses value sooner. After all what else can you do other than keep money in the bank. Buy estates and turn highly paid tech serfs into tenants? Hah. Best chase nfts.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago

renewiltord 5y ago
MMT-caused inflation just an effect of an alternative to taxation and is an effective means to keep spending moving. Like any other outcome of monetary policy it has winners and losers
Certhas 5y ago
I looked up the definitions: Theft: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property. Inflation: a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services. There you go, proved you wrong.
- spawarotti 5y ago
  I think they meant that "a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services." is theft.
- ehejdud 5y ago
- zmgsabst 5y ago
  In definition 1: > as by embezzlement In definition 2: > attributed to … volume of money and credit We’d be able to conclude that “inflation is theft” from noting that inflation is driven by “printing money”, whether paper or credit, and that the benefits illicitly go to those in control of the financial system to the detriment of others — which the other poster would likely characterize as “embezzlement”. So you proved that person right — at least to people who view the Federal Reserve and large banks as in a self interested cabal. By embezzling the funds they print, eg giving special access to friends, they engage in theft towards society at large.

Certhas 5y ago

As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25. Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.

Taek 5y ago
It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.
- Jiro 5y ago
  Learning to manage money includes making correct decisions about whether a course of action is worth it. Forcing a child to save when he'd be better off not saving teaches the right lesson about what saving is, and the wrong lesson about when you should save.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Not saving comes natural to most people. Learning to save is the hard part. Most children don't ever make enough money that saving would make financial sense. The reality is, teaching kids to save their money is more a lesson in delayed gratification than it is a financial lesson.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      This is true for many children, but there’s a also a lot of kids who are too afraid to spend and enjoy their money. It is I think as important to teach children how to spend their money, on what, and get them used to understand how much they got for their money. As a kid I saved for a long time to buy an Atari Jaguar, and it was a eye opener looking back at the “sacrifices” I made for that result.
- 5y ago

kingcharles 5y ago

Funny side note: the State of Illinois spent a decent amount of public funds trying to decide whether to charge me with $100 trillion in currency fraud. The state crime lab said the currency I owned was the "most sophisticated piece of currency forgery" they had ever encountered. It was a single (real) $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe that I carried in my wallet for fun. I assume they thought for some reason it was US dollars? https://www.banknoteworld.com/zimbabwe-currency/100-trillion-zimbabwe-dollars/ https://www.banknoteworld.com/zimbabwe-currency/100-trillion...

chiph 5y ago
I bought a couple of those and got them framed as a gift. The owner of the frame shop was concerned about me leaving them with him, until I pointed out that I was going to pay him more for the frame than they were worth.
MerelyMortal 5y ago
Did they at least give it back to you? I don't know how much they sell for now, but I was lucky to get one for $20 when they were normally going for $40 on eBay. I forgot the exact result, but I once calculated the value of a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill when it was printed, and it came to something like 0.06 USD (6 cents).
- Jiro 5y ago
  I just checked ebay. Real ones sell for $100-200 US. There are also fakes, most of which admit in the description that they are fakes, and include extremely large numbers like 10^33. The highest number that you can get cheaply and that is not fake seems to be the 50 billion. They sell for about five dollars, which given the economics of ebay is probably as low as you can expect.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The one trillion ones are more rare, as Germany if I recall correctly stopped printing them for Zimbabwe soon afterwards. At one point I had a hundred stack of them somewhere.

vmception 5y ago

Should taught you how to dollar cost average on assets instead of just hoard the currency Maybe next gen parents will

anonporridge 5y ago

Never store your long term savings in a thing that someone who isn't you and never will be you can theoretically print an infinite amount of. Even if you completely trust the people in charge today, you just can't ever be certain that they'll be in charge forever or that the environment won't change in a way such that they break your trust.

throwawaybsd 5y ago

magicalhippo 5y ago

My parents encouraged me to save money, but for my birthdays so I could buy a new cool Lego kit. My parents and relatives would chip in on the day, but I would keep count during the year to make sure I was close enough. Looking back I think that was a good middle ground. At least as a 5-10 year old it was a quite concrete target yet also showed me the benefits of saving money.

tempestn 5y ago

I try to teach my kids two lessons around money. One, don't spend all of your money. Save some of it. Basically get in the habit of having some amount of money without feeling the need to spend it. Two, when you do have an amount of money that you're not spending, invest it with broad diversification. That lesson is obviously are more complex one that comes later, but it's a likewise important piece. Both to avoid the money inflating away, but also to avoid conflating the ideas of investment and speculation.