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"resulting in over $8 billion in transactions that never would have occurred otherwise." Yeah, sure! Am I the only one who thinks this article feels a little l
by retrogradeorbit 15y ago
"resulting in over $8 billion in transactions that never would have occurred otherwise."
Yeah, sure! Am I the only one who thinks this article feels a little like pro-fiat PR for an era where central banks are "printing" ad-infinitum to indebt future generations to address the current political expediency? Something real to back your wealth? Bah! Promises to repay stored in a computer system is the only way.
Someone should post this on zerohedge and see what kind of responses you get!
- fennecfoxen 15y agoConsider the scale of the money supply as managed by a central bank using fiat money. Consider the fraction that's not already electronic, paper currency. Do you really think that turning that to electrons will make a difference? For reference, in the US, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.ht... (That's ~$1028 billion in currency, of ~$9755 billion in M2, to say nothing of other assets.) And when you get down to it, all that makes assets like "gold" (and other commodities) valuable as currency is the promise of being able to exchange it for something in the future. (Unless you were planning to do something useful with the commodity itself, which seems mostly unlikely.) Whether this promise is actually more credible than your favorite fiat currency is a discussable matter, but not perfectly clear.
- retrogradeorbit 15y agoWhat about reliability and security? How do you buy food when the computer system has crashed. (Or the banks have collapsed?) Even paper fiat allows you some robustness to this. Precious metals even more so.