Daniel Wigton on Nostr: Drat! A serious discussion. I refuse to be contrary just for the sake of it in one of ...

Drat! A serious discussion. I refuse to be contrary just for the sake of it in one of those. I am no expert on anything really, but I am always good for a strong opinion loosely held.

I don't particularly disagree with your friend. Clearly SOMETHING has worked. I wouldn't claim that success is because of fiat or inspite of it. It certainly has played a part, but I think the actual discussion is somewhat perpendicular to the fiat/sound money axis.

People just want to exchange resources and effort that they hold or can produce for resources and effort they can't or won't produce. To a first order the "How" doesn't matter, but there are some properties that we prefer to have. The main property is a fully connected graph. If I provide value to node B. I'd like to receive value from my choice of any other node in the network. The catch is that node coordinates include a time value. I want to be able to receive value from future nodes. This isn't a novel idea or anything. It is just me being all fancy in saying that money should be a medium of exchange and a store of value. The only point of value is noting that, if we don't want to differentiate over time any more than we want to differentiate over distance, then we don't really want inflation or deflation. One preferences the future and the other the present.

We mainly want indivuduals to be able to predict the value of their transactions. The better they can predict, the more efficiently they can price their goods and services. Fiat does that by adjusting the money supply. (In theory) Bitcoin does it by fees and difficulty concensus. Individuals need to pick their poison. Trust your government and system of banks, or trust the collective members of the bitcoin network. There is no such thing as trustless. If there was, people wouldn't be so excited by the current Bitcoin Core debates.

"Bitcoin fixes this." and "Fix the money fix the ______" fill in the blank, are superstitious religious nonsense. What we really want are mechanisms of collaboration, that is what money is, a way to collaborate with people we may not know. All the above mainly assumes that people are free.

This isn't to let fiat off the hook. Sure it has sort of done it's job in enabling commerce, but things would plainly be better if people could save money without inflation and could make significant investments without incurring debt. Taxation is huge as well. It isn't so much the monetary cost as it is the complexity cost. Taxes carve a hole in commerce between the really small (buying lemonade at a stand) and the really large (running a business) simply due to filing requirements.

Nothing prevents bitcoin from having similar issues. If you want to prosper, be moral, be trustworthy, fix yourselves, then the money won't matter. Or at least not as much.