Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/09/rap-battle-between-alexander-h.html
…
1 Like
Does anyone else find that when someone uses the term “fiat money,” it automatically reduces their credibility across the board by somewhere between 50-85%?
13 Likes
Depends on the context. I mean, it’s a perfectly accurate and good technical term for the sort of money we’re using these days!
2 Likes
Yes, 100%.
To me, a lot of the pro-crypto arguments remind me of the extreme free-speech absolutist arguments you see hard right wingers make on Twitter. Sure, free speech is important, who could disagree, but the arguments are made in bad faith because they give a lot of cover to racists, nazis, white supremacists, and the like.
Similarly, none of the pro-crypto arguments are really wrong. Who could be against more freedom and all that? But for me all the pro arguments fall flat because the crypto world is run by speculators on one end and a small number of drug dealers and other types of shady “independent contractors” on the other.
2 Likes
Why, that’s almost exactly what I came here to say!
Bitcoin is a neat idea and all, but what’s obnoxious is how basement libertarian bois think that learning one fairly arcane term makes them seasoned experts on the whole field of economics. It’s like how those same people memorized 30 pages of detail about the Soviet Su-27 Flanker radar system in a Tom Clancy novel, and therefore sneeringly assume that they know better than you about communism. They’re, like, a whole subcategory of right-wing slappability.
11 Likes
It’s light-weight.
3 Likes
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I admit that Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. It’s a Yugo currency.
6 Likes
All joking aside, before Bitcoin it was the goldbuggers who used “fiat” disparagingly, and their issue with it was that central banks essentially created money out of nothing. Gold is Good because there’s actually something behind it.
Along comes Satoshi, literally creating money out of nothing, and the Bitcoinistas think fiat money is bad because…? Oh yeah, freedom something something.
7 Likes
The problem with bitcoin isn’t that it goes against “fiat” currency, the problem is that it wastes a fuck-ton of energy for no useful reason, and it is designed to become increasingly wasteful over time. We should treat the people who use bitcoin like the people who deliberately break their trucks to “roll coal”.
4 Likes
Dogecoin. This has gotten out of control.
2 Likes
Bitcoin really behaves like a commodity – only you can’t actually do anything with it, which is the whole point of commodities. You can only try to sell it to someone else at a higher price than you bought it, which obviously is not sustaineable.
4 Likes
I use the term fiat currency when discussing fiat currency because it’s an accurate technical term, not a political value judgement, which economists and historians used long before anyone had ever heard of cryptocurrency. I guess if that loses me credibility in some people’s eyes then so be it, but I’m hardly anyone’s idea of an an-cap.
Having not heard of the “Doge” meme at the time, I thought it was a clever reference to the Doge of Venice who sat atop the city-state’s financial empire for a thousand years. Alas, I inadvertantly gave Dogecoin’s creators WAY too much credit.
FTA: “Virtual currencies like bitcoin can be regulated as commodities by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal judge ruled.”
However, the commodity in question is wasteful mass stupidity with a side of environmental wreckage. And its massive bubble is heading for an inevitable bust.
3 Likes
the crypto world is run by speculators on one end and a small number of drug dealers and other types of shady “independent contractors” on the other
…there is a thread that unites these seemingly disparate groups though - they are all tax-dodging assholes.
2 Likes
I have no problem with the term “fiat currency” as a technical term. When goldbuggers and Bitcoinistas use it as a term of disparagement (in contrast to their own particular hobbyhorse), I throw up in my mouth a little.
2 Likes
Aw, c’mon. There will always be a Greater Fool.
1 Like
I don’t blame you. But I ignore those people because they’re all either grifters or fools or both.
how much of gold’s value derives from its value as a currency, and how much from its value as a commodity?
IIRC, much more of the former, but the latter’s not an insignificant amount. My not-based-on-any-facts gut feeling guess would be 2/3 of the former, 1/3 of the latter.
If anyone here actually happens to know, please correct this!
