• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    I don’t think the belief in its value is going to collapse on its own. It is already accepted to have value by enough people, to sustain that belief.

    These things change. People once believed that diamonds were a valuable rock and essential for proposing marriage, but now people are starting to think that’s BS. There was massive social pressure, plus expensive propaganda from deBeers trying to keep people buying diamonds. But, people woke up.

    So much of crypto’s promise is that there will always be another sucker who will buy your bitcoin for more than you paid for it. But, if actual real currencies that people pay taxes with can collapse, crypto could collapse a whole lot faster than that.

    • DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      I don’t know why you’re connecting paying taxes with a currency with it being legitimate. I don’t think those things are related

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Because actual money has sources and sinks. If you look at MMT for example, they talk about government spending not as being a way for the government to distribute money, but actually as a way the government creates money. When the government taxes money, it doesn’t just collect it, it destroys it.

        So, based on how much a government is spending and taxing, it’s adjusting the supply of money in the economy. The fact that government spending is roughly the same year-to-year, and that taxes are roughly the same year-to-year gives a stability and flow to actual money. There’s a constant demand for it because every year the US government requires that people and businesses submit $4.5 trillion in taxes. There’s a constant supply because the US government spends more than $6 trillion.

        Bitcoin doesn’t have those sources and sinks. There’s no constant demand for bitcoin every year to pay taxes. There’s no constant supply as a government spends bitcoin into the economy. The “realness” of money is intimately tied to taxes and government spending.

        • DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone
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          24 hours ago

          The fact that Bitcoin works differently to fiat is what gives it value to some people. Being different is the point.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            21 hours ago

            Sure, in the past people had gold for the same purpose. The difference is that gold has at least some intrinsic value. It can be made into beautiful jewelry. It has industrial uses. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, so if people lose confidence it could drop to 0.