Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

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The way I understand money is to treat it as a technology. A technology is designed and operated to serve a purpose. The money of countries like the US and Europe is intended to serve as a medium of exchange, a temporary store of value, and a tool of government tax and monetary policy. I think it's expected that people will hold onto a minimum amount of money, and store the bulk of their wealth somewhere else. Most people don't have substantial wealth in the first place.

Bitcoin is intended to serve another purpose: To demonstrate the behavior of a money system that is not controlled by a government.

As with any technology, people use money if it's useful to them. If a country has a poorly managed money system, then people start to use the money of some other country, or barter. If bitcoin has a chance of supplanting government money, it will happen when bitcoin works better for the people using it. I suppose this could happen sooner in countries that have really bad money, or if the use of government money becomes prohibitive because of transaction fees.

I strongly disagree that it is a temporary store of value. People are much more likely to store wealth in fiat rather than gold. We are also quite happy to denominate long term debts in fiat currency.

In my view, people are more likely to store wealth in stocks and real estate. (This could be disproven by comparing the overall market value of those things). At the same time, we denominate long term debts in dollars because we have expectations (with risks) about the long term value of the dollar. Those expectations are baked into the interest rate.

And most people don't have any wealth to speak of.

very valid analysis, but how do you identify "countries that have really bad money" ? it doesn't happen overnight so which countries are going to face monetary issues in next 5-10 years, hard to tell? and unfortunately general public doesn't proactively monitor(and it is too complicated for public to understand because for some reason most of the primary schools don't educate about personal finance and monetary system) so most people realize after crisis had already taken place (mainstream news is their only validation).

The reason hackernews is great is because it has some audience which wants to discuss and debate how things work. This is a very unique and good form of education, only internet made it possible.

But for large part of society they don't understand technology. Technology or science should be simple to understand, humans developed language- that is also a technology to me(do we really need a science degree to understand those things). For some reason large population thinks of tech people or scientists in general as nerds or geeks and that it is not cool to them. I think the flaw is in outdated primary education and the way we define education. And the portraying of science people as nerds or confused people on TV further exaggerates this.

We can't blame governments per say, for a democracy to work properly everyone has to participate, and part of the newer generation will eventually become the future government. In order to participate, you have to understand how things work. If people are not taught how to think critically early on and they're either caught up in making a living or watching and following bunch of trendy celebrities on twitter and tv, it is not going to happen.

That's a very good point. A technology can get screwed up. Maybe that's a good reason for identifying it as a technology, so that people don't think it grows on trees, and are more inclined to keep an eye on it. One indicator might just be a flight from a bad money system to a good one. I once met a person who ran a factory in Brazil during a period of hyper inflation, and he kept his money in US dollars.

A bigger fear is that the most robust currencies get screwed up, i.e., what might be loosely defined as a global financial system. If that were to happen, then the benefits of "good" money could simply vanish, i.e., prosperity.

I'd love to make personal finance and some basic economics be part of K-12 education. I'll bet college would suddenly get cheaper. ;-)

agree 100% :)

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