this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
449 points (96.5% liked)
Curated Tumblr
5242 readers
38 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair, Economics is half imagination and magic. It’s why something like bitcoin could even become a thing.
One of the main things I learned during my economics degree is that money is fake.
To quote Brian Brushwood, "It's just pieces of paper that we believe in."
The reason that you and everyone else believe in it is primarily because you need it to pay taxes, so the belief is not arbitrary.
Thinking of how I got here, reductively speaking:
I agree, but that leads to an infinite regress of your parents observering their parents, etc. My argument is really about the start of this chain.
Ah I see!
Convenience ought to have helped too! Though yes when the person with that monopoly on violence thing asks, you do.
You don't need Bitcoin to pay taxes, yet belief in it continues to grow.
That is true, but Bitcoin, like all other crypto"currencies", is a Ponzi scheme. Its value is driven purely by speculation, and the hope that it can be passed on to a "greater fool" for profit. This is true for a lot of financial assets, by the way.
You don't think secure time stamps are useful?
Lots of people don't have to pay taxes.
True, but somene has to, and they will create a demand for the currency. If I hear that Joe the baker needs money to pay taxes, and I want to buy bread from him, I know he will accept the government currency as payment for his bread. This in turn makes me demand money to be able to buy the bread.