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In most of the people's mind, money is a standard unit of value. Just like using meter to measure length and using kilogram to measure weight, people use money to measure value

Based on proven economy theory, value is decided by supply and demand: More supply and less demand will decrease the value, vice versa. However, this does not apply to money: Money can be used to purchase anything, the demand for money can be regarded as infinite. When demand is close to infinite, the supply will not change its value in any significant way. So for average household, the money's value feels the same for them regardless of money supply

So there is a strange phenomenon: Banks create money to dilute the wealth of the whole society, but when average people are becoming poorer, they need banks to create more money to rob them so that they could get a little bit more income. As a result, banks create 100$ of money but give them 1$ so that they can hang on for a while

If everyone's money suddenly increase by 1000 times, then money's value will crash right away. The art to maintain money's value is to keep majority of people's demand for money at close to infinite. So increased money supply should be used to buy assets and debts, to increase average people's living cost, make sure that they never have enough money. Only through this way, the money's value will be stable

The amazing thing is: Such a system seems to be formed naturally over time. It is the demand for money that enslaved majority of human. And the more they are enslaved, they demand more money, thus make the money more valuable

Of course the money I'm talking here is fiat money

Money is a means to get wealth but not wealth itself. I'd buy some property with that cash and turn it into intrinsic wealth. Obviously most people don't understand the economics or ethics of money, but if they did they'd probably be outraged.

Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it

You could also say the same about god/religion.

I have the impression that you don't understand what is fiat money. The problem is not the fiat, but who controls the fiat.

It does not matter who controls fiat, the creation of fiat money is essentially a double spending, see this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=947040.0

We dont need banks to create fiat but only a software and mathematics.

Will you live without money? I think the answer will be "No". It is a big problem to resolve and I think it will pass a lot of years maybe centuries before that there will be a real "change". We need a real revolution, that has to start from the citizen (maybe better to call it not citizen but human).

Great, that's the purpose of this thread: I want to research, what kind of thing can be used as a standard unit of value universally?

I have thought about many different candidates like air/water/food/time/energy to use as currency, but later I found out that value is all subjective, once you get enough of the currency, their value will drop for you

So the way to make currency's value stable is to make the demand infinite, e.g. make most of the people poor, then the currency will become stable

Or the other way: To make the supply side extremely constrained, thus no matter how small the demand is, the value never drops, just like those art paints and antiques

Another consideration: It may not be important to be stable, it just need to be predictable. For example, with bitcoin as currency, a long term appreciation against other things is guaranteed due to limited supply, thus people could easily reach a consensus about this character, then it can be used as a benchmark to measure value, since everyone knows that the value of this benchmark itself increase at a predictable rate

Money or types of currency have been used since 700 BC.  Since then it has been a way for people to fall into a certain social class and also so that everyone would not own a $500,000 house. If everything was free would you want to work? Almost everyone would say no. Money used to be backed up by gold (at least in the US). Since then the dollar is based on the governments supply of money instead of it's actual backing in gold. If you look at Germany after WW1 they printed tons of money to pay back the countries that they owed and the citizens money was almost worthless because of the extreme inflation rate.

We are not all slaves. Some of us choose to like the idea of collecting a big pile of money.  ;D

The big pile of money that you collected are just some numbers banks write on their book, the original ownership of these purchasing power belongs to banks who wrote it out of nothing. The more you collect those money (by doing various work or business activity), the more they write, that is the slavery

Uh... not really.

For example, I play a MMORPG, where literally all game money is created by the creators of the game at will. I play the game to earn game currency, does that mean I'm a slave of the game creators?

And real life isn't like that. Banks/government doesn't have 100% control like you think they do. If they print too much, they end up breaking a delicate balance, and harming themselves along with everyone else.

John nash said that ideal money would have some standard predictable and stable measurement backing supply of the currency token.. Something like an energy cpi or something maybe even amount of joules it takes to mine a bitcoin? It encompasses everything from harvesting the energy src to using it in the most efficient manor.
In this way it cant be hacked like the central banks do with inflation targeting.

I've always thought that in the far, far future, when we can literally form matter into whatever we want, (i.e alchemy) the only currencies would be matter and energy, and whatever other basic component of physics that I'm not aware of.


Since those are the only things that matter, and you can make anything physically possible with those components. There would be no need for a token to represent values, since everything can have their values accurately measured by their worth in terms of amount of matter/energy etc spent on making it.

Only thing stopping utopian society is greed... Thus you need concentrations of wealth to avoid complete collapse.. It may come slowly though..

In a sense yes, you are the slave of the game designer when you play the game, since all your time and labor is used to exchange some tokens he can create infinitely, but you get some fun in the game environment as exchange (you typically get enough coins to buy super nice things that you can't find in real life), and you can give up playing the game anytime at will

But in reality, you don't have a choice, you are forced to play this game "life", and the designer of the monetary system decided that you have to use this token called fiat money. You work to earn some 100 dollar every day, and they print trillions to buy anything they want, and all those things are manufactured by people like you. Of course they have a limit to not cause heavy inflation, but give me the right to create money and I will invent hundreds of ways to put inflation under control without limit the money that I can print for myself

It's the demand for things that enslaves people to money.

Banks make money to...well...to make money, not to dilute the wealth of others! If I borrow money to buy a home or an education it likely increases my wealth.  I only dilute my wealth if I make bad money decisions or fall to the risk I've decided to take.

exactly!

We can use whatever we want as a standard & universally unit of value. Remember that everyone has the right to issue his own money, I'm not obligated to accept euros, dollars, yen, etcc for my "service" o for buy and selling things ; this is the craziest thing in the state, you were born and you have accepted automatically all the rules of the state contained in the "social contract" this is not "democratic".

However I haven't a valid answer yet, but I have already explained my thought. Thanks for the attention.

Many of us use money to measure work and we need money to measure that. One hour of a cleaner's work is worth less than one hour of a doctor. We need money for this use.

Sadly we live in such a world. This is why money needs to be separated from the Banks and government. This is where Bitcoin comes in handy.
One can get a pretty clear view of the situation if you take a look at how much money the richest people have combined.

Money is always going to be used and its actually a great concept and can work well. What doesn't work well is how it is corruptly issued by a central authority and I think that is one thing bitcoin solves with its decentralization. Maybe one day and over time we could transition away from fiat to a decentralized currency whether that is bitcoin or something else.

funny thing is that humanity created the problem called "money"(they did it by giving value to something useless), and now they need it to be happy

this is why human stupidity is endless

Money was created to solve problems... it was unevitable to not create money, capitalism has given us the most development ever in history, the question is if money will start being a problem more than a solution once machines take over most of the jobs.

I don't think that "money" is the problem. It's how people use it or exploit it that's the problem - and that misuse comes from government and regular people alike. Both can get into too much debt, both can spend too much, but can be careless.

The ability to use currency as a means to buy goods and services has allowed the world to go from subsistence living (i.e., creating what we need to survive, each of us individually) to more productive, specialized living. It's given us the advancements of science, math, industry, etc, that make the world such a brilliant place to live in.

Don't blame the tool that is money, blame the people that abuse it. And I'm not talking about the 1% or the 99%, I'm talking about irresponsibility.

Money isn't really the problem, it is how people tend to overvalue it over any other things. It is the greed of people that enslaves his kind, and money is just a medium on where Man can exhibit his greed.

And this is not just a small problem, it is fundamental! People should understand, that as long as discrimination and rasism exists, we will be enslaived by others. And money will be just a tool to maintain our control!

That is not correct.
Read Nick Szabo's groundbreaking paper about the origin of money (it is not that long, and it is a fascinating reading really!) http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html.

In this anthropologists, archeologists, evolutionary psychologist presents the facts that money, or money like instruments - they call them collectibles - were used no less than 70.000 BC AT LEAST, waaay before bartering or trading itself emerged from exactly the new possibilities money enabled. Without money (collectibles, - the ability to hoard and communicate wealth and "favors" among humans, THROUGH SPACE and TIME with moderate or no TRUST), so without money abstract there would be no civilization !!!!

Homo sapiens sapiens is the only species on Earth capable of wealth transfer between descendans and ancients through using money/collectibles/titles/deeds to pass on to their children.

Also, there are no "classes". Having 100$ per year as an income or 10000000$ is not a qualitative difference, it is a quantitative one, in principle they still have the same societal boundaries (right to own property given they trade it/laws to be obeyed by everyone), just less or more wealth doesn't create classes (you could not separate them anyway, a poor lower class citizen in the U.S. is probably still in the top richest 3% of the Earth's population. Good luck with classification and marxism :)

Slavery was the last "class society", where we had "zero income, no right to property (as the ground zero property right is to own one's own body!) at all" class (slaves) and "non-zero income with the right to have property" class (everyone else). That one is a qualitative difference!

About the 0.5M$ house: there are cheap and expensive houses because of scarcity of supply against huge demand, or vice versa.. Example. There is a fixed amount of housing that can be built looking at Central Park/Eiffel Tower. So those going to be more expensive ones because they can only facilitate a fixed amount of tenants which is a smaller number than how many would like to live there, price goes up etc etc. Supply/Demand.

In this example it shows perfectly why you CAN NOT eradicate money. Why? Because without it -aka it is free, how o you decide which 500 of those 62670 people who want to move in next to Eiffel tower actually does? Lottery? Violence? Would pure luck or strongest  surviving ethically superior to voluntary exchange of marginal utilities?

No answer i guess, because money is just a conflict avoiding solution to a a physical fact that: time,space, and resources ARE scarce, and if demand>supply, somehow humans need to solve this equation (preferably non violent).

Like George Carlin says << the World are fine, the people are fuc**ed>> and I think he has right. The problem here isn't the money but the people and for the moment there isn't a valid solution.

It was people who invented the idea of money - a universal exchange medium that can exchange anything, and when that ability holds over time, it also becomes a store of value

The problem comes when some economists look at the fact that money is never consumed, and regard it as merely a token of exchange, then they had the idea of producing this token out of thin air to just meet the demand for exchange. This in turn gives the purchasing power of newly created money to money creator for free, thus the money creator step by step becomes the largest slaveholder, and they try to create any crisis that can make them print more money

It is the fact that some of the people can get money for free created slavery. If money creator need to pay equal amount of value to create money, just like a gold miner or bitcoin miner do, then there is no slavery, producing money will be the same as any other business

Nah, if people had their basic needs meet and a decent life, most of the criminal rates would go down. Of course not all would be fixed, but the main cause of violence would. The fact that some guy can park 5 jets on his backyard while others have to work life draining 9-5's + 2 hours of public transportation daily is a form of violence, you can't complain if some of these guys eventually snap.

Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - while this is generally the truth is is also not the whole truth. Humans needs some form of easy exchange tool. Money is that tool. Bitcoin and gold, and any other precious metals and minerals are too. The only difference is the level of acceptance of certain payment method. While you can't pay for your grocery shopping with your gold ring, you can sell it in specialized shop. And that is the difference of acceptance.

Sure, universal acceptance is the prerequisite for a medium of exchange, and that is most easily done by government making a law or announcement. It is also easy to see why central bank won't use bitcoin as national currency, they just need to pass a law then they could start to print money for themselves. If they use gold or bitcoin, they will lose all that previlege

And there is a requirement for universal acceptance: It must actively flow in the economy. Crypto currencies might be superior, but if people have to convert their own currency into another currency and then spend, they need some strong motivation to do that on a daily basis. In this regard, the first mover advantage of fiat money as a medium of transaction is very clear

Luckily, with bitcoin you have that motivation: If every bitcoin investor first buy bitcoin and then spend on daily consumptions, then the increased monetary activities in bitcoin economy will raise the demand thus raise its value. Of course another motivation is to escape the fiat money robbery, but I guess few really have the urge to do that since the robbery is almost invisible and almost can not be felt

Fiat literally changes because of supply and demand. This is why we have forex.

Now to answer the thread title, money was created in the place of trades. Remember when people used to trade animals for other food or jewelry and such? That's basically now, but instead through a piece of paper with a number on it.

That is the theory, in reality, if workers demand a 5% wage rise, they will be fired. They would still be fired if they do not accept a wage cut  ;)

It depends. Sometimes 5% of wage is less than cost of coaching for an unexperienced labourer.

The wage do not rise because there are so many skilled workers out there

The dilemma is: If a worker is outstandingly smart and creative, then he would be creating his own business and not working for anyone else. But if a worker is just like many others and do the routine work, then he will replaced by machines and robots

This is a little bit off-topic, this thread is about money's slavery effect. Of course automation and AI is a even more severe problem, it is not about slavery, but annihilation of work. You still got some money under money's slavery, but with the arriving of AI you might not get slavery even if you asked for it, you are totally out

Lets just say if some people did not have money, they would be as useful as a wet tissue.

If I didn't have money, I could offer my skills to barter for other goods or services. This is what money fixes, it creates a field where everyone can play on.

It is lucky that we now have bitcoin where the supply no matter what can't be artificially created. I agree with your analogy, every time when fiat get printed, that is generally robbery because banks actually dilute the value of each individual's holding and they don't ask your permission or agreement to do that. And when that happens the same amount of fiat which can buy you that amount of goods will one day require higher amount of fiat to get back the same amount. And that is what we call inflation versus bitcoin's core principle which is deflationary

If a basketball player didn't have a basketball, he couldn't do much. If you didn't have your arms and legs, you probably couldn't offer your skills.

Some people, like Venture capitalists, are good at using money to improve the world. That's the thing they're good at. They might not be good at fixing computers or cleaning toilets, but they're good at managing money.

The problem is when all your skills and what you have to offer gets automated by machines that are 100000% more efficient and cheaper than you.

And because human society is driven by fiat money, only those who can create large amount of fiat money can mass produce these robots and make majority of people lose their job, this is also a result of being fiat money's slave

Bitcoin does not change the ultimate result of machine replacing people. But it might change the centralized society like we have today, so that more people can afford a robot or two to do the work for them

This would make no sense on a larger scale. Machines exist so that humans could switch their activity to something more interesting/rewarding. If all men would one day become unemployed, then there would be no market for the goods machines produce. So it is a self-balancing system with a feedback loop...

The self-balancing mechanism only happens decades ago, when you still had lots of demand for the whole society and lack of production capacity. When most of the production can be done by a few companies, majority of people will be out of job and income

It is true that if all the other people are unemployed, then how to sell the products that robots made? No worry, government will borrow a bit to hand out as food stamps and social security and keep majority of people living a just OK life. While robot companies and banks took large amount of resource and build their heaven island somewhere in Caribbean

What is the purpose of overcapacity? There is none, so it is profitable for governments that people should be employed to the full by any means (besides, employed people are less prone to social unrest). There is still much room for making the elites' lives better, even in the Caribbean. So no worry for the majority of humanity...

Overcapacity is a natural result of technology improvement, with each stage of technology improvement, large amount of people were thrown out of working force. Government has endless credit line so it does not matter if it is profitable or not

Just remember some nice talk from Interstella:

"Because he knew how hard it would be to get people to work together to save the species,  instead of themselves or their children. Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier. We can care deeply, selflessly about those we know. But that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight."

Similarly, it is difficult to let people work together to change the world from fiat money's slavery, since their line of sight seldom extends beyond their salary and profit, not even mention fiat monetary system itself

Yes, but technology improvements still don't make producers better off per se (and it is not government that pushes forward technological innovation). You still need effective demand to get profit out of these improvements. But how can this be made possible if large amounts of people are thrown out of working force (and don't get employed somewhere else)? New manufacturing processes always shake up the labor market, but as we see that human population grew exponentially since the Industrial Revolution with the standards of living ever improving, we can only make one inference, that is, advanced production turns out to be creating more jobs in the end...

Could you explain this by just "government having an endless credit line"?

Fiat money's slavery is not bad at all. We work hard to earn more money, but this is invested in real assets.
If the current monetary system is not going to change in our lifetime, why bother with it?

Lol working hard is a scam. You are working hard and making peanuts so other people work smart/have luck and make millions out of you with 1% of your effort.

Exactly, and many people might have a similar view as you. You'd rather working 20 years to get a house, and contribute enough interest to bank so that they can also buy a house with the flip of a pen

Same as religion, monogamy, gender, nationalism, authority obedience, capitalism, and so on. If you take a person's mind, they will give you their body.

That is the sad part. You can be decent hard working man but without right environment and luck you will be probably working like a mule and earning peanuts. But in reality satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory. Acquiring money is not ultimate goal of humans.

Well not really, someone must make those machines. Someone must maintain those machines. The only reason we simplify these tasks is to move on to other tasks.

In fact, the only reason why we (actually, producers) simplify these tasks is to make more profit by introducing more efficient production. Though I agree in general, the end result is essentially the same, i.e. we move from less interesting tasks to more interesting ones...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_JkazmhSpE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_JkazmhSpE) says all.

It's going to take what, 1% of the population to maintain and make those machines. What is the rest of people going to do? most people will simply not be needed in the future, including us.. but maybe we are all dead by then.

The economic history of the world reveals that division of labor leads to increased productivity with each technological paradigm shift (through deeper utilization of resources), but at the same time requires more and more people with ever narrowing specialization. Therefore your fears are mostly unfounded...

As I said, the problem is the people not the money. If tomorrow I want to print 100 dollars I can't , isn't it? I didn't choose this economic system, and I will fight until the death.

Debt is the real problem ? lol

Indeed good questions. I think it is about a saturated market. Difficult to deal with

50 years ago,  when people are still relatively poor and had lots of demand, you need to accelerate the production to fulfill those demands, and productivity can not increase dramatically overnight, so you need lots of people involved to speed up the production

But now when almost everything is done, existing production capacity can satisfy the demand, and it is constantly increasing in efficiency, as a result, more and more people are laid off

The demand is still there, it is even more. However, production are centralized to a few multinational enterprises, the supply is not done by millions of people collectively, but by only a few thousand people. It is this concentration of production removed many people's income, so that even they have strong demand, they can not consume due to no income

Those enterprises first made huge profit, then start to get worse, since their potential customer do not have enough income, that reduced their sale. And when they have less sale, they will fire more people, worsen the situation

So you have to find a new demand area that can absorb those excessive labor force and give them enough income to restart the economy. Unfortunately, it seems most of human's demand are just fulfilled. When I go to a super market, I'm always amazed by so many things that seems useless

So far, as part of the solution, government can borrow a lot of money to run large construction projects, could be long term and expensive projects like a bridge from Florida to Cuba  :D

Those projects will never generate any meaningful return, so it will just be a huge expense, created millions of jobs for a while, but since government can borrow money endlessly, this is not a big deal

Maybe in future, 90% of people will be participating this kind of government projects, like researching new robot, new medicine, new power plant, new base on Mars...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DwYo21LTK4

Here's a 3 min video on measures/symbols and compares money vs. wealth, by (IMO) an incredible philosopher by the name of Alan Watts.  I'm not sure what the forum rules are around posting videos - there is an ad on the video unfortunately, but I'm not affiliated with the uploader.  It's just a clip from a much longer lecture which you can search for.

Anyways, he is great at questioning basic assumptions that normally go unquestioned as we grow up and become conditioned to our particular society.  Money is one of those basic assumptions, that even though it's one of the most important things to understand in today's world, the average population a) doesn't have a very good understanding of it and b) accepts that level of ignorance and doesn't feel the need to learn.

I live in Toronto, and through elementary school, high school there is very little in terms of learning about the monetary system and money.  I went to what is considered a top business school in the country and specialized in Finance, and still other than learning about financial/economic theories and concepts, there wasn't much in terms of learning about money or the monetary system.  That was skipped as an assumption that everyone already understands it.

The learning unfortunately, comes outside of the education system (at least from my experience), with personal interest and research.  I'm interested to know whether anyone here has learned anything about money, monetary policy, central banks, the history of fiat money, and maybe the history of American currency over time and the different systems they had in place, how they changed from being backed by gold, partially backed by gold, not backed by anything, etc.?  It seems important to know for anyone that uses money, which is everyone.

True, those theories about money are always correct under a monopole monetary system, because people have no other choice but believe whatever they say, and they can always find an explanation for what happened and what they plan to do. But now we have a totally different monetary system built on bitcoin, we can try and see if those theories are correct

If alien come to earth, they will be shocked by the fact that human on earth will starve just because money printer is not working

Or maybe because it's printing too much.

Now, how could we live without money? If I go to a restaurant without money, how do I pay? Or would they feed me for free? Free beer, too?

Interesting.
Are you familiar with the publications of John Keynes? I bet you you'd love his ideas.

However I think this topic is more of a philosophical issue and it's not about money after all. But it's about human nature with its constant growing greed.

Lol.  Wouldn't it be cool to see a documentary on human beings, just observing behaviour with no basic assumptions?  Narrated by David Attenborough of course.


I haven't been a fan of the Keynesian system because like many other theories, it only works properly (to benefit the general population rather than a selective/elite group) with a benevolent government that has no self-interest.  So with a responsible government, it would work a lot better, but with the current style of government, it just gives way too much power to a few people, which is constantly exploited at the cost of avg Joe.  All the wars that we've had in the past few decades....would it be possible without a Keynesian system?  The speculation and asset bubbles?

So far, I only see libertarians wanting to move away from Keynesian economics, and they don't have a realistic chance at being elected.

I've heard the claim that infinite demand for money allows increased supply without triggering inflation, but it's usually used to justify money printing, so that's an interesting idea. However, both sides miss something important when using this argument: The supply of goods and services doesn't change as a result of a higher money supply (although a higher money supply can temporarily drive increased production). The more dollars there are chasing limited goods, the less it is worth.

It doesn't matter if society realizes this is happening, they do understand on some level or another that buying power is falling when prices rise.

You can't really blame banks here though. Fractional reserve banking is, as you say, a natural phenomenon, but, at least so long as there are reserve requirements (either by fiat or necessity--to maintain solvency), private banks can only *multiply* real currency, not mint infinite new currency. The amount of real currency created by central banks directly controls the money supply, therefore, central banks *over the long term* are always to blame for inflation.

Indeed, the concept of money has been around for thousands of years, and after the society split into many specialized industry branch, money as a universal transaction medium facilitate trades between people, people don't know how to live without it, it is like air and water

Maybe someday in future, when everyone could produce everything they want with the help of a robot, trade will become unnecessary, then money will disappear. But due to human's limited life time, specialization is very possible to extend further, thus money will never disappear

If money is always needed, then the best we can do is to make sure it distributed based on the fair trade principle: Market decide its value and its cost is close to its face value

In today's world, production capacity is just like the demand for money, is almost infinite. With more money invested, there will be more goods and services produced, to make inflation in check, or even trigger deflation, due to more products and non-changing demand

As soon as there is some profitable goods, money will flow in like flood and mass produce those goods immediately. We have seen such kind of dramatic change in industry landscape of bitcoin ASIC miner. It is jaw dropping that during a very short time of 2 years, all the last several generations of semiconductor processing node has been passed and now we are tapping the newest processing nodes which are still in laboratory phase

So it seems no matter how much money is printed, there will be corresponding goods/services generated quickly. But the problem is on the ownership: All those newly created money belongs to some private banks, they give nothing in exchange for those money. That created a loophole in the financial system, so that banks will eventually claim everything's ownership by just printing money

What a sad world would it be, it would basically mean that human cooperation is not anymore required.

Making money is sadly seen as shameful is my country, because it means that "we eat too much of the pie, that is unfair".
But when we think about it, money is the only force that make us act for the well being of strangers without being compelled to do so.
Money is the reward for being helpful to someone else, this is often forgotten.

Well, I don't think we should blame people for that, I must admit that this definition is not very legit in today's world.
The definition of money has been corrupted, not because of "society" or "mankind" greediness, but by the very persons who defined themselves as sacred arbiters of value on behalf of the society.

The money is a must because people need some kind of value token to do the trade, it should have universal acceptance, so fiat money is the closest candidate. It is this definite demand for transaction medium give fiat money value, and no matter how heavy the slavery is, people will still use it, since they don't have other choice

However, if people managed to produce some other universally accepted value certificate, then that can be used as money, so bitcoin is really creating a new alternative

Well I think it certainly would, but I can see your point.

We need wages being paid in bitcoin, having to convert your fiat into bitcoin monthly to use it it's annoying.

There exists a need for regulation and centralization; the Libertarian's wet dream of decentralized EVERYTHING would fail because it would require people to act not on impulse, but for the greater good.

That borders on socialism, no? And look how successful that's been in history.

This, right here. The money supply is insulated from the supply of goods, those are generally determined by disposable income as per inferior goods and what not. Overall, money supply economics are far more complex than a few theories can describe, simply because there's so many factors to take into account. It's constantly changing, unpredictable, and a clusterfck at best.

Those opposed to welfare are Fucked. We are headed towards a future where automation will allow for 95% of people not needed, and 5% of human labour will be all that's needed to generate the world's GDP. When we get there... you either give the people that "aren't needed" a welfare or prepare for a total catastrophe.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=998993.0

Is it possible that today's highly concentrated industry structure is caused by the fiat money system (Large enterprise get larger loans thus expand much faster than small enterprise and wipe them out by economy of scale)? Would bitcoin make things better because there will not be an easy way to get financing through credit expansion?

We are still quite far from the type of automation that will allow for 5% employment.  Even if the majority of production is automated, there are still many other components of a goods producing business that may not be automated if they are competing in a relatively free market.  Procurement, logistics, marketing, sales, support, R&D, etc. would still require a human component without AI right?  Then there are service industries.

I consider Tesla to be one of the most technologically advanced companies, where a large portion of their production is automated, but they still need to employ a ton of people, not only in production, but for the other components of running a business.

To your point, there would need to be a better way of distributing resources aside from time-based income though.  Almost sounds communist.

True, automation require a lot of R&D, and when complexity raised above certain level, the cost will be higher than the gain. In a highly  complex system, a small bug will cause days of delay in automated system, which could trigger a chain of reaction.

But anyway that is the trend, maybe not 5%, but 20%, there should be a framework that can be adjusted based on how much labor is needed to re-allocate the resource to those redundant people. Current solution is printing lots of money to create lots of useless job just to make people get something to do, not a bad idea but far from efficient

Another thought: This imaginary concept (money is a standard unit of value) is unconsciously used by even the most famous economists throughout their works, all their formulas and calculations are based on this simple assumption, which is just a wishful thinking

Similarly, all the science is based on two unconsciously accepted prerequisites: Space and time. Without space and time, there is no science.

Without money, there is no economics. However, unlike space and time, which we can not remove as prerequisites for the world, money can be avoided. The true economy theory should not use the concept of money, that will make it much easier to see the truth behind all economy activities: Desire

So there are a few issues keeping us from going towards this automated economic model.

1) We don't have enough people on the tech/r&d/engineering side currently, so we would need many more people to be educated (in or out of school) in coding, software development, robotics, engineering, etc.
2) What happens to the rest of the people that are useless in the new system?  They are the majority.
3) In this system, only companies that actually produce or optimize goods/services are useful - so things like financial services, which don't really produce anything but take a cut from everyone that does produce, will need to
4) How are resources distributed for production?  Ideally it should go to the most productive and beneficial options.  Then once goods are made, how are they distributed if the majority of the population doesn't make income?

We are currently so primitive compared to the type of world we're dreaming of...I mean like you said, we have the money printer going and engage in war.  Could you have any stupider people leading the world?  Once you've conditioned an idiot to think he's doing good by killing another person that he's never met, something's very wrong.  In the new world, that idiot would need to be programming a manufacturing robot. /end rant.

For the transition, I think the tech companies will have to set the stage and compete solely based on technological innovation.  Elon Musk is making a huge push for tech companies to expand into other industries, and I really think when you have brilliant minds, they can take over whichever industry they please. 

In fact the productivity is already enough high for most of the people to retire early, but due to the existance of money and exchange, this can not be done

Imagine an island with two people Bob and Alice. Bob is very smart and can produce 10 times more products per year than Alice. In today's monetary system, we suppose that Bob will earn 10 times more money than Alice (Money is used as a unit of value)

But that is simply not possible, because Bob's income can only come from his sale to Alice, and Alice have much less productivity thus much less income. As a result, Bob's income is limited by how much Alice can spend

The current solution is government charging heavy tax on Bob and give them to Alice so that she can buy more Bob's products. It also means that Alice get more income than her production, because of Bob's high productivity

Or, government take loan to run infrastructure projects, give Alice enough income to buy Bob's products

Anyway, the core of the problem is: High productivity people can not fully utilize their efficiency due to low demand from low productivity people. Unless they give up some of the productivity for free, there is no way to reach 20% employment

If Bob is not profit oriented, he can max out his production thus maximize the social wealth, but he won't have enough motivation to do so, since redistributing his products to Alice is more like a donation. Money is that motivation: If Bob can exchange all his production into money, he has some motivation to produce more, since money will store value and delay his consumption until a later time. Unfortunately, since Alice have little access to money, Bob can not make money by himself alone

The rational solution for Bob, is to spend 10 time less time at work than Alice, so he maximizes effort/money.
Government intervention or not, it would not change the rational decision.

Oh please.  Elon Musk can't even make Tesla profitable.  Have you ever looked at their financials?  Terrible

Robinson Crusoe fallacy.

If they are only 2 people or even a hundred people.  They are going to collaborate not compete if they want to survive

I always thought it was incredible how someone changed the mind of the masses to use this flimsy piece of paper, that holds no true use to its name to being the most dominant trade item in the world.  Think about it, You literally can't do anything to money except destroy it and trade it, and it has no use beyond what we make it.  Same goes with bitcoin though, they are not actually worth anything to our survival, but they have this invisible worth and we all kind of just accept it. 

On a thread where there is criticism given to a our monetary system and money itself, and your input about an example for technological innovation and automation is about money and profits, then you likely missed the point.

Tesla is not profitable and doesn't plan to be profitable for the next few years.  They are having to invest in infrastructure to grow production capacity and distribution, which Tesla has explicitly mentioned takes precedence to being profitable.  He mentioned they're making about 25% gp, which is very profitable for the auto industry.

You've made it clear that you're not a fan of Tesla, but no one needs you to be one.

I trade TSLA regularly and I know their financials well.  Elon Musk is not someone I want anywhere near our financial system.

First if all the guy is a stock manipulator.  He might be a brilliant engineer and maybe even a great showman/ marketing hype man.  But all he does is pump his stock before a debt raise and dump it when it gets too frothy.  You know he did a $3B convertible w Morgan Stanley for his so called "gigafactory". They timed a pump where MS did an upgrade w a $300 price target.  And like a few days later they announced the raise and dumped the stock from $265.  If I was an investor, I'd be pissed.



LOL if you believe Tesla has 25% margin w NON-GAAP

We are talking about high productivity here, with the help of technology, Bob does not need to cooperate with Alice, but he need Alice to buy his products with money, this is a strange but prevail culture on this planet

Two people's island is just a metaphor, it involves the basic elements in today's society: Production, exchange and consumption. In such a society, each one must find his customer to sell his products/services, a model of two person is enough to represent the whole society

What people really care is not the money, but the things that the given money can buy. You can have some other kind of securities like bond, stock or option, but you can not bring any of these securities to a restaurant and order a pizza. The universal acceptance in commercial is the key for money. Since fiat paper is guaranteed by law to settle debt throughout the whole country, it automatically become the best form of money domestically

In fact, if something is universally accepted in commercial, it will automatically become some sort of money to clear the debt between different entities, even without government/central bank backing

An example is restaurant/supermarket coupon, often used as a replacement for fiat money in a small area. These coupons have a valid period, before they expires, they must be used to redeem the product/service from the issuer. And they become useless if the issuer went down . For fiat money, they are valid until the government went down, obviously much longer than those coupons, but still not as long as bitcoin or gold

Most people think the same, but the reality is not quite that. In most jurisdictions the law guarantees that with the national currency (called legal tender in this case) you can only pay taxes and debts to the state. This means, for example, that a buyer may not insist on settling accounts in "legal tender" with a seller ("the right of a seller to refuse doing business with")...

I'm not sure what the relevance of your response is.  The thread is criticizing the financial system itself, and I brought up Tesla as an example of great technological innovation. 


Please share your source and non-GAAP margin numbers for Tesla with us instead of using analogy.  For the past 6 quarters, Tesla has had >25% margin reported.  You do understand that non-GAAP allows more flexibility in reporting than GAAP does right?

Just imagine a break-through in the capacitance of energy storage devices (something like cheap tritium batteries). The required infrastructure is already there, and all of a sudden Tesla becomes profitable and far ahead of the pack!

I misread your post.  I thought you were saying tech guys should make economic policy or that they will somehow more important than finance.

I hope you realize Tesla only exist because of the finance industry.  They sure arent selling any cars to that that valuation.

They don't calculate their margins like other car companies so their numbers are misleading.

BTW TSLA closed $185 on Fri.  Hope your not long

I was responding to another post about theoretically having automation of labour, that would only require 5% employment.  That would require a huge push in R&D, which would need to be driven by tech guys, because who else can do it?

Tesla was privately funded until 2010 I believe.  So throughout the financial crisis, when they came very close to bankruptcy, the government didn't loan or grant Tesla anything.  In 2010 they received a government loan, which has already been repaid in full, with interest.  Then I believe they received another loan to expand their production capacity, and tax cuts from Nevada from building the gigafactory over there.

So the problem with Tesla right now, is their production capacity.  They were only able to do ~33,000 cars in 2014, and will approximately double that in 2015.  But still, they are a drop in the bucket in global car sales.  So it's going to take a few years at the current momentum to be a big player in the industry.

Their GAAP financials will be normal COGS subtracted from revenues...what are you speaking of that's misleading?  They have a lot of automation, and literally form the body out of raw sheets of aluminum, so their production facility is pretty efficient.  Check out the videos if you're interested.

Yeah, I'd like to pick up some TSLA shares at this point, but all my USD are invested right now.  I'm Canadian, and I don't want to convert CDN to USD right now because the exchange rate is ridiculous.  I'll need to sell off some GOOG shares to free up some USD, but I missed the boat at $570+ a couple days ago.  TSLA is a super volatile stock, because it's valuation is based on bets about the company well into the future - so very speculative. 

I don't want to derail this thread too much but (1) they count lease as a sale.  (2) they count ZEV credits towards revenues.  Non GAAP shows revenues inflated like 40% over GAAP

Tesla is an investment banks wet dream.  A charismatic CEO willing to use Twitter to pump the stock and legions of brainwashed investors.

Do you own a TSLA or know anyone who owns one?  

How do you think they raised $3B of debt recently?  CEO misleading about Panasonic investment, big China push timed w a pump upgrade from Morgan Stanley.  Did you know they already burned through half of that money only actually spending $50M on factory?

Now investors imagination run wild about pivot to home battery biz??

CEO says production constrained while drop in Q4 deliveries due to bad weather and people on vacation?? WTF??  I would not call him a liar, but you cant take anything this guy says seriously.

Its your money but IMO TSLA is a short.  It took long enough for the momo to wear off

I dont like GOOG technicals short term either if that means anything

We have derailed the shit out of this thread dude.

Leasing should count as revenue, because it is revenue, just not all upfront.  EV tax credits are from the government, but Tesla should still count that as revenue.  If they didn't count it as revenue, then they wouldn't be liable for paying tax on that income.

I don't own a Tesla, but my friend has a P85.  I used to live in the suburbs where I had a very car/motorcycle-centric life, but I'm in the core of downtown near the subway line and can work from home, so I barely drive these days.  But if I had a lifestyle that required a lot of driving, I'd love to have a Tesla.  Price tag is pretty steep for me though.  I'd rather put that money towards my home.  The Model 3 will be interesting though, as it will be significantly cheaper.

I'm not sure about the loans or spending that you're referencing, so can't comment on that.  Which factory are you talking about though?  The cost gigafactory is around $5 billion.

Tesla is a different type of investment for me, but I don't have a whole lot invested.  I trade Canadian banks and telecoms taking into consideration technicals, but I like the concept of Tesla more than I like it as a vehicle for returns.  I like that they're making a push on EV and have some consciousness towards the environment.  I like that they're making that push through technological innovation rather than propaganda.  I like that they're taking a stand against having dealerships force themselves into the auto industry to take a cut, whether or not you need their help with sales.  I don't see any other automakers doing anything remotely revolutionary.  They've committed free lifetime charging via the supercharger network.  Elon's end goal isn't profitability, and I like that. 

Haha yeah it's totally derailed.  The topic is hogwash anyways.  Saying we are enslaved by money is like saying we are enslaved by food because without eating we'd die.  Or we are enslaved by education because we need knowledge to have a functioning society.

Please check the meaning of slavery. By definition, slavery emphasizes the idea of complete ownership and control by a master. Since central banks completely own and control every newly created fiat money, and in turn those money is going to exchange for all your products/services, you are a slave of central bank

Food, education etc is different, because unlike central bank creating money out of nothing, no one can get the initial ownership of food and education without putting similar worth of work/resources. The exchange for food is normal commercial activities, the relationship between you and food producer is just business partner, but the relationship between you and central bank is slave and master

Paranoid much?  I don't need to check the meaning of slavery.  You need to

We are enslaved by money and the fed..

Why do we work longer hours yet cant afford the same things? Our lives are inflated away.. Go back to 50s and ppl worked half a day and only man worked.. Now both need to and still. Not enough.. Granted more expenses.. But basics are still too high

Good observation. In fact the efficiency has increased by thousands of times since the invention of electronics and computer, and working hours increased, but the living condition has not improved by thousands of times at all, where have all those added productivity gone

It is funny that the more money they need, the more right they give central banks to enslave them

From central bank's point of view: People desperately need me to print some paper to enslave them, without these paper they will die

How come people leave their fate in the hands of a printing press? Maybe because there are used to be something special that this printing press can provide: Trust

Money supply increase a couple of percent per year until 2008, and then went out of control

It is not paranoid if people can accept a couple of percent tax each year by inflation, but now it is 500% tax in a couple of years. Stockholm syndrome maybe  :D

The monetary system is what created the world as we know it. It made a simple way to measure how much wealth you have in comparison to other. The idea of having more than the other, greed fueled by self interest.
I wouldn't have it any other way

But what if how much wealth you have isn't based on how much you have produced vs. how much you have consumed, but also how close you are to the creation of money.  For example, should a bank have first dibs at the money created in a monetary expansion by the Fed?  So they either make a speculative play on it or lend it out at a higher rate and profit from the spread?

You have a company that has done with money, what UPS or FedEx does with a shipment.  Take it from A and get it to B.  Let's say this is a mortgage, and now you'll be paying an annuity for 25 years back to the bank, and they will make a spread on the interest, and they will profit from that.

Now take a farmer, that produces food, an actual good that all humans require.  The profitability likely won't be as high as a bank, if profitable at all, and in fact they may require debt to survive.

Why doesn't the farmer have access to freshly printed Benjamin's from the Fed?

Then in the event that a bank speculates with the money, and loses the bet, like in 2008 when several banks were up for bankruptcy, why do they then get even more money given to them?  When does the bankrupt farm get bailed out?

That is more a problem with this particular monetary system, rather than money in general.

Value is all subjective, 1 million dollar worth a lot for average household but almost nothing for bankers. You don't care about spending 1 dollar more on your dinner tips, but for some other people that might be one day's pay. And the funny thing is: Those who get lowest salary work the hardest, while those earning millions of dollar per year lying on the beach, just because today's monetary system

Indeed, today's monetary system greatly benefit money creator and those who are close to money creator. Money creation has become a stronger power than presidents, but this power is purely built on people's imaginary concept of money, if they don't have this concept, then the power will disappear (An example is that you take some Chinese Yuan to England and try to spend it, it will not be accepted except for Chinese people, since in English people's mind this is not money)

However, it is almost impossible for people to get rid of the concept of money, I think it is a very old, government dependent concept

Also, it is very difficult to imagine what is an ideal form of money: You can even use some scientifically accurate unit to measure value, like 1kwh electricity. However since the supply and demand will change based on market condition, 1kwh electricity would worth more during winter and less during summer, thus make it not suitable to work as unit of value

Ideally, an unit of value should keep its value constant regardless of supply and demand change, so it is best it is just an imaginary concept, does not have any demand. But as soon as it has value, it will have demand, and demand can not be a constant, so it is just impossible. That's the reason central banks trying to manipulate the supply to keep up with the demand change, but that is a best effort thing, since the demand usually changed long ago before they react. The reason fiat money have stable value is just because people's consensus that it SHOULD have a stable value, and banks keep majority of people from getting more fiat money, to make sure the demand is close to infinite

This happens because those lying on the beach grab the best part of what those who work the hardest produce. It would be insincere to say that today's monetary system doesn't add up to this, but to say that it is just because of it would be a little too far-fetched, in my opinion...

Since money can request others' product/services, it is a power. Who get the right to create this power will rule others. Without this power, those who lying on the beach can not request the product of those who working hard, and those who working hard could gain more wealth than former, that is a natural result of energy input

Will you live without money? I think the answer will be "No". It is a big problem to resolve

and I think it will pass a lot of years maybe centuries before that there will be a real "change".

We need a real revolution, that has to start from the citizen (maybe better to call it not citizen but human).

Will you work without money ? If yes, PM me, I have an opportunity.

So the interest rate, which inversely affects the demand of money, is also set by the central bank.  Artificially low interest rates, cause artificially high demand for money, followed by monetary expansion.  I think that this Keynesian model of central decision making only works when the government makes decisions in the best interest of society as a whole rather than being in the best interest of a select few.  Seeing that the government is not currently capable of making decisions for the greater good, that power to control and manipulate the monetary system should be decreased, and likely with a decrease in the control of money, the corruption will decrease as well.

Yes, the key question is: Could people live without fiat money? That really require some thinking

The concept of money exists since there was trading, the original money was something that can satisfy everyone's demand, so grain and cattle were used as money, and eventually settled on gold because of its universal acceptance. When gold is used as money, the other utilities of gold are blocked, leaving only transaction utility

The current form of fiat money is already close to the abstraction of money: only satisfying transaction demand. However, it has a fatal flaw: Central banks can create money at will. And since money is power, this gives them too much power

If central bank is GOD, and only works for the greater good of humanity, then no one will question the validity of his action, he have all the right to change money supply, to make sure the economy is on right track

Unfortunately they are just human, when human command god's power, that power will always corrupt, as seen in banking class today

Actually this power is not acquired by force, but automatically granted by people who believe the value of their fiat money, if people don't believe (just like when they see a strange foreign currency note, they have no idea of its value), then that power will disappear

As long as people need fiat money to live, they would always grant banks the power to enslave them. But is it really a must to use fiat money to live? Use gold for example won't grant banks that power, since banks can not create gold out of nothing. Gold standard is removed by the government, they also helped banks to achieve today's status

Religion is also an imaginary concept, also many enslaved by it.

I have heard about that Jews were sent by the God to rule the rest of the human, thus they became the bankers. Maybe it is a religious belief that human should be ruled by bankers

But now it seems the religion of science is more widely accepted than bible, the tide is turning

Billions.

Even people that don't subscribe to religion are affected by it, as religious concepts have made their way into laws and policy and infringe on civil liberty in some cases.

Religion involves a lot of conditioning from an early age, and I think it is becoming harder and harder to condition kids that have access to the internet.

Is this another leftist thread to trash on money?

Because money is not the root of all evil, that is nonsense, nor it is something made up and inexistent.

It is a concept, which is a mathematical representation of goods and services that are valued by human interaction. Thats all money is.

Now fiat money is indeed imaginary, because the CB print as much as they want, but a legitimate currency with fixed supply is just as real as the air in your room, it is invisible and intangible, but it's real.

Just as the internet, thoughts, or sound, all of them are intangible, yet nobody questions their existence. So it's hard to get used to intangible things i know but i can assure you that real money is 100% real, and by real money i mean bitcoin and other cryptos with fixed supply.

The fiat money on the other hand are illusion.

It is true that people need money. But at the same time they need food, water and social interactions. Do you think that they are also enslaved by it? Or we are just frustrated by bitcoin's rises and drops but not happy that Nixon took the US off the gold standard in the first place? Angry that central bankers continue to meddle with the macroeconomy?

Nixon did a few key things that were critical to having the situation we have today.

1. Getting rid of the gold standard, allowing limitless monetary expansion
2. Forcing the world to use the petro dollar, increasing the aggregate demand for the USD
3. Making drugs illegal around the world, creating the largest black market economy, where conflicts are resolved through violence and prisons are filled with victim-less criminals

I think the sad part is that no one has stepped up after Nixon to fix these major issues.  He had only done these things in order to get re-elected, and we are still on the same system.

Food and water are physiological needs, so I wouldn't say that is a concept, it is an actual life or death need.

It is possible to live without money, there are some aboriginal/tribal groups that live off the grid, and interact directly with nature to satisfy their needs of food, water, shelter, etc.  This type of lifestyle isn't possible living in the city, where there is a monetary cost of living.

Religion is a much more imaginary concept and it enslaves many more people than money.

Justice is also an imaginary concept, the fact something is imaginary doesn't mean it's necessarily bad.

we just want more money.even we got what we want always we need something better. always something better than what we have. we are the slaves of modern time.

I don't see that happening. You just can't convince quite a big number of the average people. They stand for what they believe in, even if it is wrong. This is completely irrational and illogical, but so are people.   
We could see this change happen very quickly if the government told everyone that we're moving onto Bitcoin (because people.).
It's funny how people tend to complain about corruption, yet they pick the same people and don't try doing anything about it.

I like this post a lot, but think some clarification is called for...

The major means by which the elites' issuance of currency and debt enslaves the populace is not by inflating financial asset prices (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.) beyond the average person's affordability.  This is a side effect of their actions that they would rather avoid (but really can't.)  The reason they don't like it is that high asset prices can crash (especially since the assets are directly or indirectly supported artificially by central bank and government policy,) and when they do, everybody suffers, the elites included.

The most extreme cases of financial busts were the Great Depression and 2008 crisis, so far.  The elites would definitely not want a repeat.

The major means of enslavement is issuing money and debt to benefit themselves while financial stability lasts, and making the entire economy absorb the costs of the resulting long-term inflation and financial instability.  If you think about it, while confidence lasts, issuing debt is as good as a license to print money.  Politicians get re-elected by conjuring up "free" money to fund benefits and projects.  Bankers take a cut in the new debt they issue.

Another important point is that money's unique status among commodities (that it's always desired) is not a device of enslavement.  This is the core design of the monetary society, to facilitate its unique and irreplaceable role as a means of exchange.  The trouble only comes when the elites don't allow money's value to be determined by the free market, but use some form of public power to artificially prop up the value of the money that they issue.  (And the root cause of trouble is that the elites have quite personal incentives to maximize the issuance, and so the system can't possibly be stable, at least on a long term basis.)

Money's value has an tendency to be regarded as a constant when people use fiat money as a unit of value

This should be called "The dependency for standard"

When you use a failed scale to measure the weight of your suitcase, you will accept whatever the reading the scale give you, since normally that scale is the only standard of weight that you have. Unless you have another scale to compare their result, you won't notice that the scale failed. In fact, even if you have another scale, you still won't know which scale failed

Similarly, if you compare USD and Euro, you can't tell if Euro's value is dropping or USD's value is rising, or both of them are rising/dropping at different speed

In a commercial based society, people need such a standard unit of value to do business. Because everything's value fluctuates, they turn to authorities to seek the required standard. However, authorities also have no idea what is the standard unit of value, but since people demand it, they invented fiat money to satisfy that need. In turn, they discoverd that this price stability usually holds by itself because people think that standard is from an authority. So as long as they maintain authoritative, they could print themselves lots of fiat money while still satisfy this need of price stability...And when they measure price level, they only need to exclude the price of those things that they buy, e.g. capital goods and debts

Great points on the standard unit of value and relativity.  There's always a certain percentage of the population that is looking to scam money.  Dates back to "reeding" coins in in the 1700's in the states and probably even earlier in other parts of the world, where the mint started adding ridges to the side of a coin so that people couldn't skim precious metal (gold/silver) off the sides of the coin.  In the 1900's the scam artists began to control the money supply and started to counterfeit money legally.

I think that price stability only exists because the USD maintains global reserve currency status.  Other currencies have drifted into hyperinflation with overly aggressive monetary expansion.  

There probably is an underlying need for the standardization of value provided by money.  But if and when money clearly buys less and less, people will notice and take evasive action (as happens frequently outside the "core" countries.)

There are a host of facilities used by issuers of paper money to hide the forces of inflation.  The reason Britain kept acquiring colonies was to manufacture demand for paper sterling by having captive governments use it for reserves.  On the eve of World War I, while publicly committed to the convertibility of sterling to gold, Britain held only 3% of the gold required to redeem the total issued paper.  In its day the US used military help for Cold War allies as bargaining chip to have them hold reserves in dollars (and ditto for oil-rich dictatorships.)  There is a reason the US military is present in dozens of countries.

There is also the mechanism of "exorbitant privilege" of reserve currencies, used by both Britain and the US during their respective hegemonies, effectively (via a certain pattern of global capital flows) to offload most of the economic pain and instability of currency and debt creation (in the dominant country) to the developing world.  This is a well-known phenomenon for economists.  And you wonder why there is resentment and terrorism (not that the latter can be justified, just that it is objectively the effect of what is essentially theft by finance.)

Today, deflation (as a result of the financial bust and debt overhang) among the middle and lower classes of the West is the mechanism by which currency retains its prestige and value.  And you wonder why there is growing inequality.  This is essentially the same thing as "exorbitant privilege," but working in a domestic setting.

Each country's citizen regard their own currency to be the standard of value. This is a habit they learned from their childhood. When EURUSD exchange rate drops, Germans will think that USD's value increased, while US people will think that Euro depreciated. The price level domestically normally won't change following the exchange rate change, but it will cause a profit/loss for enterprises doing international trades

I think this is because that when people are seeking authority's support, they normally won't go beyond the boarder. A foreign corrency is just too "unauthorized" for them, thus not suitable to measure value domestically

This is very centralized way of thinking, people unconsciously require a central authority to provide them with the unit of value. Could we find a better standard?

It depends on the country's trade deficit and how high the inflation is. If you have hyperinflation combined with high level of imports, the price increase will be transmitted to the local population at a fast rate.

Fiatmoney is the biggest scamcurrency ever. "Somebody" said: "Give me control of a nation's money
and I care not who makes the laws."

OP you re right. We are enslaved by it. Our economy, society and politic is designed to make the avg. joe always to strive for more and more (money)... for a handfull of people money is just a means to an end.. just digital(virtual) numbers.. Something non-existent in "reality"... But its too late now to change it... We can have interesting discussions and brainwaves, and the so called "aha-effect".. many of us might check whats happening behind the curtains.. But we won't ever be able to change anything... They control to much now. FED, EZB, the house of sauds, and the other mighty six.... They knew how to make it... sad truth. They placed the foundation stone to the world we are living in today... we are all just small gear wheels in a complex system. And they ARE the system......

So bitcoin is our savior  :)

But I get the concept money though, cause years ago we used to have something called "barter" where you traded something for mine.

The reason we do have money, is to resolve this issue. Its why most people dont barter and now spend something that they want, and not have endless arguments that my watch is worth more then whatever you have as an example.

Indeed, the problem is it's an accepted scam.
Bitcoin is far superior to our lovely fiat system, and here's why:

http://antonopoulos.com/2014/03/02/failure-is-an-option/

The interesting thing is: As long as people unconsciously use domestic currency to measure value, there will not be inflation. Inflation does not rise following more money supply, more money supply will just make people work more and produce more. This is because in today's society, productivity is almost unlimited, only demand limit the production. When demand was artificially raised by the banks, the production will immediately increase to a point that even more goods than demanded are produced

Imagine that an enterprise suddenly received a large order from government/banks, he would happily expand his production and hire more people to produce more. It is very unlikely that he would keep his production scale and raise the price instead. And if he really did, the order would just fly to someone else. Unless all the merchant in the branch raise the price at the same time, they usually accept the order without change the price, in reality they even give discount to large orders

The only thing's price that can rise quickly are those with limited supply, like land. But anything with limited supply is usually regarded as asset thus not included in inflation statistics

Things are not this bleak (or at least I hope!)  There are multiple ways this system can break down.  The system is inherently unstable, due to the incentives for the elites to maximize the issue of money and debt.

When it does break down, like a poker player in a large pot holding cards not good enough for the pot, the authorities can choose to bet big and hope others will fold, or fold.  Betting means eventually using political repression to supplement the financial repression, and has its problems in established democracies.  Folding means, probably, pegging currency to gold at a very high price (since gold is what central banks have.)  They would have suffered humiliation but they would at least keep their power and get their stability back.

Another potential problem of betting is that the world is getting more multi-polar compared to the Anglo-American centuries.  Will the rising powers continue to submit to the old system?  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have just written a "pessimistic" book on this topic.

The Western authorities have been trying to get demand up for almost 7 years now, without much success.  The real reason they can't just keep applying and intensifying their stimulative tools (say, more "quantitative easing" or tax cuts or public spending) is that confidence in the money and debt they issue is already fragile.  Once confidence collapses (as these propped up assets tend to be stable, until they're not!) the authorities will lose a lot of their power.

Low consumer price inflation is helping them walk this tight rope.  Confidence in money and debt would be almost impossible to maintain otherwise.  Low inflation comes from global and Western domestic inequality.  Inequality deprives poorer countries and poorer people of money, so their desire for money makes them want to do a lot of work for low prices or at artificially low exchange rates.

But inequality feeds on itself.  Inequality means many people will work on frivolous products and services to serve the whims of rich countries and rich people.  Once there is any wind of another financial bust (as the system is financially unstable), the rich will readily cut back consumption, and many people will get poorer.  So the cycle continues.  Since this is socially unstable, some kind of seismic shift has to occur, one way or another, eventually.

The last time around, that seismic shift was World War II.  Now that major countries all have nuclear weapons, I don't know what will happen.

How about freedom? I know its a really untrendy stuff nowadays, but c'mon let's just try it once, i promise nobody will hate it once you get a taste of it.

How about we stop paying global banking maffia that print away our wealth, and governments that rob us with all these ever increasing taxes?

It's really time to try freedom too :)

Would love to!

IMO the ultimate, final, real problem is... us.  The "system" is actually a partnership between the financial and political elites; one couldn't survive long in current form without the other.  The political elite gain "free" political capital by issuing public debt (and often money too) but they need an innovative financial sector to dream up and issue financial assets that people will believe in (at least temporarily,) to suck up the money supply, or else the extra money and public debt would fuel inflation and expose their theft.  (One of the old classic innovations was the bank account -- when your money was earning interest as a "deposit," it's not out chasing goods and inflating prices.)

How does the government get very smart people to engage in the risky activity of banking (including the risk of being abandoned by the government when the going really gets tough?)  Offer them a share of the loot in the form of some kind of public guarantee of their debt, lax regulation (given the guarantees,) etc.  This is fundamentally why private banks end up profiting from taxpayer guarantees.

Since, in the West, we vote in the political elite, nothing will really change unless we wake up.  We could bump into some good policies by luck, but the elites would always get their pound of flesh eventually.  That is, unless we finally become aware, and add monetary management to the list of post-Enlightenment prohibitions against the state.

As soon as the "financial system" breaks down, which would actually break (you/me) the citiciens of the world down and not the "power-holding organizations", we ll face horrific scenarios... It would actually be one of "their goals" and it would rise their power. Democrazy isn't what we think/hope it might be. Did you know: The global financial institutions and exchanges are trading more gold than the world holds in reserves.... ?? So virtually theres more gold in existence than in realities existence... "funny" enough. as i said: Sad truth.

Technically, this slavery is self-imposed. If people can live without using fiat currency, then there will be no slavery. But it seems they'd rather have a unit of value and become the slave instead. In fact the slavery also comes from the fact that they are desperately dependent on the banks, so when banks failed, all their deposits will be gone, so banks must be bailed out

In a planned economy system like Soviet Union, the resources are allocated to each person equally without the need for money, thus this kind of slavery is not possible. But you have other kind of slavery from the communist governors, and you really don't know how much of your work went to the government, since most of your income are not salary but equally allocated food/residence/cloth. However, under such a system there is no motivation to improve, you get equally allocated resources no matter how hard you work

Is it possible to have a type of money without being enslaved?

To avoid slavery, this money must be created by a cost close to its face value, but then you have to keep the cost at a constant level to use this money as a universal standard of value. Since the productivity is always increasing, the cost tends to go down over time, to compensate for that, the supply should also shrink over time. From this point of view, the bitcoin design is on the right track

There's definitely more paper gold, much more, than the physical stuff that's supposed to be backing it.  Leveraging is what banks do.  For citizens of the world like you and me, avoid paper gold.  The worst of both worlds.

When you're faced with a Herculean task, you have the choice, to fight the fight, or say it's hopeless.

Regardless of the merits of each choice, what we have are just theories, when it comes to the difficulty of the battle.  With this much complexity and uncertainty, every theory looks about right.  We don't even know for sure the market pressures the elites are really facing.  For all these reasons, I'm not throwing in the towel.

Enslavement is the right word.  The first line of the Internationale says, stand up, you who don't want to be enslaved.  (The lyrics have a footnote that the Party is an exception.)

Money is necessary in any society beyond bartering (which would be horrible.)  As soon as you have money, you're introducing something which may not have intrinsic value, but represents real value in the world.  As long as everyone agrees on the standard, there should be no problem, and there hasn't been for millennia.

The value of each unit of money, until states and banks learned how to manipulate it, always fluctuated with market forces, and humanity lived fine.  In fact, the economy thrived under this system during the Italian Renaissance and under the Scottish "free banking" system in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  (Scottish per-capita GNP went from half to equal of England's during this time.)

Bank failures would not be horrible at all, systemically speaking, if every "depositor" was fully aware of what they were getting into.  The real trouble is the implicit (if partial) government guarantee that gave "depositors" a false sense of security to begin with.

It's a fiction of modern elite-inspired economics that the value of money must be managed or all hell will break loose.  The truth is the opposite.

I agree that this is possible, but only living "off the grid", in nature, with a sustainable hunter/gatherer tribal type of lifestyle.  However living without FIAT is not possible in urban areas.  Just from a taxation perspective, everyone is liable for paying taxes and only FIAT an acceptable form of payment.

Banks don't need to be bailed out.  If deposits weren't government backed via bailout, then depositors would be much more interested in understanding the risk and solvency of the bank, and choose stable vs. risky/speculative banks.  With government backed banks in the event of bankruptcy, banks are able to take considerably more risk because either it goes well and they profit huge, or they go bust and get bailed out.  In a free market, the shitty banks would fail, depositors would lose money, but taxpayers would not and better banks would be created in their place.

It really shouldn't be treated much differently than any other business that fails.  If I create a business that can't stay profitable, why is it the problem of the taxpayer to keep my business afloat?  Furthermore, could those resources be reallocated to someone else who could do a better job of running the business?

Failing is a healthy part of the economy; it gets rid of the parts that couldn't adapt to change and lose relevancy.  To start taking resources from productive parts of the economy to subsidize the failing parts is foolish.

i would gladly switch to crypto completely, but i do realise that its impossible. atleast for now.

Banks don't necessarily need to be bailed out. It is only the small depositors who are protected by insurance. Large depositors and equity holders take a hit when banks close down.
It is only the large banks which are systemically important that the government considers supporting. If most banks are at risk, then the government has to step in because failure of these banks would result in chaos.

The reason for central banks to intervene by providing funds for bailout is always done in the interest of preventing a chain of collapse. Most of these financial institutions are inter-related to each other controlled by the same bunch of corrupt people and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually lend the money to each other to cover their own a**es. So you can imagine if one of it go down, it will pull the rest of it together.

To be totally blunt, modern banking is essentially fraudulent.

Bank profits are treated as fruits of private labor, but bank failures are shouldered by the public sector.

The reason this is legal, beyond the payoffs to politicians (a minor factor in the big scheme of things) is that the political elite have an enduring partnership with finance to jointly extract wealth from everyone else via issuing their respective financial assets.

It's true that banks *are* too big to fail, but this wouldn't be the case if banks were not backed by the public in the first place (ie everybody would be more careful when lending to a bank.)

Read the new book "Fragile by Design" and it becomes clear.

Im just hoping when Bitcoin starts becoming more mainstream the concept of "becoming your own bank" arises and starts making banking as we know it effectively obsolete. Once we can store everything we need at home and all over the internet safely and decentralized, then who the hell is going to handle their stuff to others? I guess there will always be people that want that but a big % of people don't want to, but they don't know any better.

In fact time has almost equal value to everyone. Each person owns about the same amount of time during his entire life. But unfortunately, time can not be transferred

Not really, some people die at 20 some people die at 90. Should we have a "time welfare" where we would take out the "life energy" of 50 year olds who could live till 90, and let them die at 50, and give it to the 20 year old that would die in 20 just to live till 50, is that moral?

Time socialism?

Good lord that "life energy" can't be robbed from you by the governments, otherwise this would be the first thing to legislate.

Unfortunately Money can be robbed from you by the government! So there is a fundamental difference!!!  ;)

Yeah I don't really get your point. Some die at birth and some make it to 110 years of age. Also, life quality is as important as living for a long period of time.

Yea, i bet many 30 year odls who die young lived much better, and probably died because of their extreme sports or whatever.

Than many people who live until 110 and regret alot of things that they didnt have chance to do.

So quality is a big think, thats why i think money should not be distributed.

Add life to years, not years to life. (forgot the author :D)

You get maximum 2 magnitudes of difference, while in fiat money, money creators can claim trillions of fiat money with a flip of a pen and many people barely make their ends meet

If you want to define something's value to be universally equal to everyone, thus can be used as a unit of value, then fiat money is definitely not a good candidate, since it worth so little for the money creator while worth so much for poor people. However, if you take 10 years time, it would worth similar to any one with normal health: 1/7 of his life

I bet if time could be traded, socialists would want to rob us from that too.

There was actually a movie i forgot the title, but it was about trading time... so its not totally impossible

Unfortunately bitcoin doesn't solve the problem of who controls the money. 

There's no central issuing authority so I'm not talking about the traditional form of currency control, but the control that comes from the fact that anyone adopting bitcoin today probably has to buy it from an existing bitcoin holder.  Creating your own is barely economical for people in China with access to some of the world's cheapest and most polluting energy sources.  It's no longer a currency that anyone with some knowledge and a little bit of cash can have a go at generating and not lose value overall in the process.

I believe the bitcoin price mania that occurred in mid/late 2013 was stifled by the simple fact that people began to look at one bitcoin and wonder why it should be worth more than the other traditional and ancient form of currency, one troy ounce of gold.  I know we can shift decimal places, use mBTC and declare the above statement doesn't matter, but it's impossible to hide from the maths.

Just a side note, there never has nor will be something that has universally agreed value - people are willing to adjust their perceptions of value for convenience and simplicity (for example converting USD to YEN, some might feel the USD is valued correctly - but they'll still convert because they need it for their holiday).

The reality is that you need a medium of exchange (hence fiat currency) - because a pure bartering system is difficult when dealing with items (how do you have 1.5 oak tables for example?).

Its not about time but work output some are faster.

Is there any output more valuable than life itself? Of course when your life is threatened by not getting enough food and shelter, those things seems more important than time, but in today's society, those basic needs are never a problem in most of the countries

True, for modern commercial based society, a medium of exchange must be used. In fact time is already used in existing standards of value: Gold has been selected as the best candidate, because it records unbiased labor time: People use similar amount of time to produce one ounce of gold when the latest mining technology is used

But fiat currency does not record unbiased labor time: By using the latest fiat money creation technology QE, all it needs is to write some numbers in the account, it does not contain any labor time, so the value should be zero

It's only natural that gold or bitcoin becomes expensive to mine.  You wouldn't want to own something that people can easily create.

In a world run mostly with inflated financial assets (fiat money, debt, etc.) the scenario where gold or bitcoin really, really shines is the catastrophic (but highly unlikely, at least in the short term) collapse of confidence in *all* of the inflated assets.  But that is also the very scenario where various intermediaries between you and your savings have an especially great incentive to (at least partially) steal it from you, one way or another.

It's like playing poker where you hold a highly speculative hand, that will really rake it in if cards come out just right.  If, for some reason, you can't collect in that scenario, what would be the point?

So, avoid paper gold and storing much bitcoin with the exchange.

The same thoughts behind the concept of "smart contract", but the same problem as no one can approve the validity of those assets that backing them

The blockchain itself only validate the bitcoin, nothing else related to physical world, but this can be regarded as a merit instead of limitation. Since if some large gold business backing bitcoin disappeared, it will not hurt the integrity of bitcoin network, thus will not prevent others from backing bitcoin. The backing of bitcoin comes from accepting bitcoin payment, nothing else is needed to back bitcoin

if you think like that then you have never been to countries like Malawi, Niger, South Sudan, India, China.
There are people who can't afford to drink clean water. Two times food will be counted as a luxury for them. Go out and see the world, dear.

There are many places in the world where basic physiological needs aren't met, but that isn't because of a shortage of resources or output.  It is just because our resources are allocated very selectively, where a large amount of resources are accessed by a small % of people based on financial wealth.

However I second the recommendation to travel as much as possible if you have the means to do so :)

Most of the poverty today are not caused by lacking of resource or production technology, but by lacking of money, and today's fiat money system is the major cause of it, since it continuously shift wealth to ruling class

If the time of each person is used as currency, then every people in those developing countries will become almost equally rich as the person in developed countries. Unfortunately, in today's system they must work like a slave, use their precious life to exchange for some food that people throwing away every day in developed countries. Without money, their freedom is very limited, but with fiat money, they would never gain freedom

Some people might say that has something to do with education, but that is not true. A higher degree might give you a better career 100 years ago, but now there are so many people with higher degrees can not find a job.

If you look at the ruling class of those developing country, they live almost the same life as western elites. Now most of the European luxury products are bought by Chinese

Tyrants, political parasites, puppets, banksters, thiefs, fraudsters. The same trash subhumans that are infecting humanity with their filthy virus since it's inception.

We really need to stop this once and for all.

No. not only US, every country has to back up the printing of money by equivalent amount of Gold, GDP and export or any other income the country is having. They can not just print the money like that.

Without money everything would be chaos, with money everything is chaos.

Who would make the clothes you're wearing right now for free, nobody, unless they're slaves.

Good post, thank you.  What I suspect is driving inequality in general (not the abject poverty necessarily) is that there is a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle between inequality and financial instability.

Financial instability periodically robs people of savings and jobs.  That makes them desire to provide good work for money at low prices.  But with inequality, most of the available work serves, more and more, the needs and whims of the rich countries and individuals.  But too many people doing "useless" work doesn't make for stable demand.  As financial fragility builds and eventually becomes a financial bust (mild or severe), the rich (and relatively rich) cut back spending and throw the rest out of work.  Thus the cycle continues.

Throughout this process, the cornerstone is the trust in paper money.  That is the glue that holds this whole process together.

Previously, money are backed by gold, which is already done work with equal value. But now money are backed by debt, just a promise from future, and the future debt repayment is backed by the future ability of borrowing more money, similar to a Ponzi scheme

The money is the key for the cooperated production in the society, so that each person can focus on his own work. However, when money creation can be done for free, then everyone become the slave of money creator

Well what did people do before money? They either used good old fashioned bartering or provided services in exchange for items or other services. I think money is the best option we have currently and probably always will be but not with the way fiat money is printed willy-nilly by the corrupt minority that control it and that's why I think bitcoin has the potential to be better than fiat.

And why do people want to go back to be old fashioned again when they already got something that can be used easily to get everything they need? Of course money is actually more comfortable to use rather than do bartering. And I dont think bitcoin have a great potential to change our money now because we are not going pay things in a huge ammount using bags of coins. Its just like ask people to rob us carry bags of coins like that

Indeed. Even though the system is flawed we can't really go back to the old ways. Either we need something new that will work or we stay the way it is.
http://shotcallin.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/86371489/USD_Fiat_Inflation_Silently_Robbing_vs_Bitcoin_Deflation.jpg

I guess the rich people are okay with the system. It makes the rich richer and the poor more poor. Why would they complain?
Although the image is not accurate obviously it does send a message.

In fiat money's case, even the purchasing power stay the same, e.g. the production increase at the same speed as money supply increases, that still does not justify the fact that money printer get rich by just printing money without putting any real work. The key point is that money as a universally accepted form of commodity, must be produced at a cost close to its face value, just like any other commodities

The sad thing is, most of the people do not care about bank's theft as long as there is no inflation. And after one or two generations they will discover that everything valuable in this country now belongs to banks or their subsidiary, and even so they will feel it is normal, because banks are supposed to be rich in their imagination

Depends on the type of civilization.  Commerce requires trade or exchange of money.  There are also hunter/gatherer or tribal communities where people contribute what they can and work as a unit, and money wouldn't be required for that type of community.

There's nothing wrong with fiat money; it's just the method for creating money that can be a problem, and is currently a problem.  If FIAT had no monetary expansion as part of the policy, then it would be fine and would favour no one.

that's pity no one realizes it

Without fiat money, people will quickly find other substitutes, be it gold, silver, or bitcoin, but will never use some thing that is produced out of thin air

That's what I'm talking about. The system is flawed in addition to people being ignorant. Why should they care about potential problems when it is more important for them to have Facebook and such.
The printer shouldn't be getting rich. The people doing the hard work should be getting paid, but it is all backwards.

Well there could be a system that could force this but I don't see how complexity would help anyone.

Exactly, human in general are short sighted, even if a few people understand the truth, the majority will still take what they feel most comfortable without thinking, there is a reason they have been ruled by money for hundreds of years

At mean time, they are also greedy, in order to let them accept a new system, they must get some benefit. Suppose that bitcoin's value doubles year over year, then nothing can stop people from adopting bitcoin as a new monetary system, the army will accept it first

Bitcoin needs to first start doubling its value year over year... for now the price is too unstable and only those that actually understand the technology support it, which benefits people like us.

If Bitcoin doubles it's value year over year, that won't really represent stability, that will be incredibly volatile and speculative.

thats sounds a bit utopian, doesn't it? whatever like this happens, it's not a revolution, it's a new era and no one knows what it would lead to

In fact we are living in utopian now, when money can be created out of nothing at will (Just like in game SimCity, you can hack the available budget money to several trillions and build what ever city you like).  Before 1971, under a gold standard, this is not possible. The ability to create money out of nothing has created the utopian as we know it today, and it does not feel that bad when there is no inflation. The system makes a few bankers the game designer and rest of us game player

By design, bitcoin's value should double every 4 years if the number of users do not increase (reward halving), but since we are in early expansion phase, the number of users are increasing at 4 times per year, it should be easy to double the value each year. I don't think there are millions of active users like claimed, more likely one magnitude lower, there are plenty of room for growth for coming years

The previous two bubbles are caused by large shift in mining technology, but now when the technology has more or less stabilized, I don't think that we will have that kind of huge speculative bubble in the near future. A slow and steady rise is more likely, doubling the price each year

Money should be just a token of exchange. But greed changes that. Bitcoin punishes the greedy.

And how does bitcoin punish the greedy? How many people can profitably mine bitcoin today? Ironically, the only viable way to obtain bitcoins right now is to buy them with fiat, so those who have more fiat are again privileged... What changed actually?

But come on without intermediary it is a pretty hard market to EAT with my software development skills out on the streets!

The problem with paper money is that the incentives for the powerful elites to create ever more money (and associated assets) are built-in.  Since economics is not an exact science and economic signals are fairly uncertain most of the time, you can always make a case that loosening is good public policy.

The history of the unending series financial crises around the world also bears this out.  Most of the economic pain from monetary creation is ultimately borne by developing and other countries that have some kind of weakness.  Wars and terrorism are also the results, ultimately, of what is essentially a modern imperial system.

The sad truth is that if the US government didn't ally with bankers to create money and debt and enslave the world, some other government would.  In a more-or-less well managed paper money system that is well-defended by its beneficiaries, the "virtuous" cycle of financial and military power reinforcing each other and creating a global top dog can last a while (and historically this "while" has been measured in decades, if not centuries.)

The imperial system also distributes its benefits wider than we might imagine.  Every person in the imperial power (currently the US) and its close allies benefits from the exploitation.  The middle class and other productive members of the real economy in these countries benefit even more.  The elites in developing countries are also major beneficiaries by working with the empire (in effect, selling out their own people -- but who would know?)  There is an entire ecosystem of defenders of the status quo.

The real victims of the system are the masses in poor and developing countries, and those in rich countries who fall prey from the social diseases that are the natural consequences of "free" wealth -- addiction, mental illness, alienation, etc.

So what we seek is not revolution but a gradual popular awakening.  If it takes centuries, it would be fundamentally better than a violent change that would replace one set of masters with another.  We have to do all we can to facilitate this process.

Yes I agree on that people will never use something like or may be you can say that produced of thin air but how about if our era is going there and so many people are trading using bitcoin? no matter what they do people will use it as fiat money, it can't be denied in so many ways. And now the new era is coming and people must admit it they must follow if not they will be oudated

A good example of that is the prison system. In most US prisons, possession of fiat money is not allowed (except on your books), so inmates use stamps, envelopes (with postage), and even soups as money.

Actually nowadays people have the right to elect the government, however they don't have the right to elect central bank, therefore central bank is called dictatorship by some protesters

The interesting thing is, this dictatorship is not enforced by violence, but by ignorance and no knowledge about money creation. People can think it is important to select a government that supports gay marriage, while they don't think it is important to select a central bank without printing more money (thus they become the slave)

Central bank only need to setup a Nobel price of economics and tell people: If they don't print money then economy will fall into recession.  Then people will accept it. Money creation is a topic that is too far from average Joe's life, and although long term wise he is affected by it, in a couple of years' time frame he will not feel any difference between two different monetary policy

They expect the elected "public servants" tyrants to do something about it. The voters have this crazy delusion that they think the people control the government, when in reality the people are just tagged slave sheeps ruled by cunning tyrant wolfs.

The voters do hold the power, but it's a power that goes unused because the awareness isn't there.  With a majority ignorant population, voting loses its power.  With a more aware/conscious population, you'd have more philosophers as leaders, rather than politicians.

Here's one of my favourite quotes, by a French philosopher whose name I forgot lol - "There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest is propaganda"  Until voters understand that, the right type of leader will never stand a chance against propaganda.

I `m not sure our predatory species ever had a philosopher as leader. We only chose from 2-3 tyrants that are currently available, and then support the consequences. Even if voters would honestly want a great leader, the problem is there is none available. The political class if filled with warmongers and powermongers that are thirsty for more power and control. Every single law they pass reflect this.

I`m not sure what ideal leader you want but for me, I just dont want any, i want to be left alone from their silly game, and let the fools play it.

Well when have we ever had a majority aware/conscious population?  It goes hand in hand.

I think there are many great leaders, but they don't end up in politics, nor should they.  Their talent would be wasted in politics.  Current politics is based on manipulating the population, and chronic dishonesty is a job suited for a sociopath.  So it's the sociopath that can look into the camera and blatantly lie to millions of people, and then sleep fine at night that ends up at the top of the political chain.

All of the current lobbying and large corporations that fund government campaigns will never side with a philosopher because the game would come to an end.

The awareness of the world is increasing, but still far from being a majority.

Sounds like you are looking for an anarchy type system.  I would prefer that as well, but it needs to happen one step at a time.  Big government and centralized planning is a few major steps from anarchy.

And you will never have one, maybe perhaps 10-15% at most, most people are just born ignorants. So thats why any "majority rule" based democracy is an insane concept.



I dont think the leader itself is a good way of organizing society in peace. Now in war or emercencies it might come in handy to organize people by force for their own survival, but in peace times , which are not that many lately (central banks feed wars) a leader is generally not needed, people can organize themselves voluntarly or defend themselves from agressors.

Besides most sociopathic rulers are so charming that it can easily fool any people who is not a expert on this. I`ve seen sociopaths infiltrate in the freedom movements too just to lurk there, gain power and then become the next tyrant.



Yes but based on capitalism, where the forces would be so decentralized that really these sociopaths would not have more power than a few men.

I want a competition so big that by default prohibits anyone from gaining too much economic/political or military power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Well the main challenge really is increasing the awareness of humans, but there are so many forces that benefit from having an ignorant population.  We have a bullshit education system that maintains that ignorance, where the values and grading system are almost upside down.  Look at a group of ultra successful people - it's interesting to see how many dropped out of school, likely because they didn't see value in it.  Even look at kids with ADHD.  They are usually totally obsessed with a few things in life, which are not mainstream, and that obsession allows them to be amazing at it.  Instead of seeing that talent, we start drugging them out at the age of 7 on ritalin and adderal because they don't give a shit about what their grade 2 teacher is writing on the blackboard??  That kid is the aware one.  Internet is helping a lot, as localized ignorance is being shed with exposure to other parts of the world that couldn't be accessed before.

With a conscious population, where humans are treated as humans and people don't segregate into national/racial/religious teams, there wouldn't be wars.  We're not there yet, but it's improving slowly.  Not too long ago, there were slaves and people were burned alive for "witchcraft".

Sociopaths are usually very charming.  But they lack the ability to feel or express genuine emotion.  People that communicate with emotion will feel a void there, and the rest won't suspect anything.

Decentralization just goes back to reducing the size and power of government.  It's amazing how much money and resources go to the government when it's well understood that any government entity will be the least productive.

Yea i agree, mental ilness, for the most part is a made up bullshit. We label them mentally ill just because they have a different world perspective. I mean an ant or an owl has a different world perspective but we dont lock them up in a white room...

Now of course there are dangerous psychotic people, but those are a minority, but these autistic people I dont think they are ill, they just have a different world view, which for obvious reasons the establishment doesnt like


I disagree, 50% of the population are just savages, i mean they can kill eachother over a football game, how more primitive-tribalish can you get after 2000 of years of supposed civilization?

I dont think you can ever get to those idiots, they will just remain the plague of society, then theres another 40% that are just conformists, they do what they are told, and not question authority, and the rest of the 10% are "enlightened" writers, philosophers, thinkers, the basic intelligent people that can drive humanity ahead.

So far society is organized in that way that those 10% drive humanity forward and the other 90% are just leeching on it.

Doesnt matter, the conformist will always get fooled by them. They are the predators of humanity. Gizelles always get hunted by lions, the same way humans will always be hunted by our own predators. It's not like the gizelles have ever stand up agains the tyrrany of lions?  ;D



Yea but let's be honest, some leftists may say that libertarians and such dont care about the poor. And the truth is, that we actually don't. So let's be honest atleast and dont try to lie about it. Being poor in a free society is only because of ignorance.

Being poor today can be understood, but once we get rid of these vampires, there will be no more excuse to be poor because all opportunities will be opened then and only a lazy idiot would starve in that society.

Money can change people. Its influence are so great to people it can make people irresponsible and it can kill people that need money why? because people that need money are do anything to have a money even if he/she can kill a person to only have money.

Yeah its true that they will be irresponsible about what they do and they will be even go too far for this money, but the truth is not money that change their minds but the mind that is being manipulated by money. It makes their mind dont think clearly and make them do things randomly just to get what they want

You can't blame people for their stupidity! There is one thing that make us all who we are, the genetic mutation that made us a social predator... we will never change, unless we mutate to something else!

This is my solution to how to restore the damages we made to our planet

Yeah it's even very interesting to see what type of drugs are marketed by society.

Psychedelics (psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca, Peyote, etc.) = mind opening and illegal all over the world except for select tribes, not addictive
Stimulants (caffeine, cocaine, meth, MDMA, etc.) - of those MDMA is mind opening and illegal, but coffee which increases productivity of workers is completely fine, decently addictive
Opiates (oxycontin, herion, morphine, etc.) - mind and pain numbing, incredibly addictive - this is mostly prescribed by health professionals

Even look at what point does society acknowledge a sociopath?  These people usually have a terrible childhood and become apathetic just to get by, and until they commit some type of crime, there really isn't any help.  Even then, they become victim to the legal system and police, who are unable to help anyone with mental illness.


There are lots of savages, I'd guess less than 50% of the population though lol.  For the most part these are kids that grow up without love, and then turn into insecure adults, overcompensated with aggression.  It's very odd to see unreasonable aggression from a man who was loved and accepted by his father.  Without good parenting and love, there needs to be some type of therapy (doesn't have to be in the typical sense with a psychotherapist) to acknowledge traumatic events and reconcile.  It's a very difficult process for most people, but anyone can do it, it just requires more awareness and a different perspective.  Some are just unwilling to do that.


Yes, agreed.  The gazelles are just stupid, similar to our unconscious population.  With some awareness of the power they hold (which is power in numbers), the 300 gazelles wouldn't need to run from 5 lions.  But instead of awareness, they just have a fear reaction and it's every gazelle for themselves, and one of the little shits that twisted its ankle becomes lunch and none of the other gazelles give a shit.  On the flip side, look at the species of ants.  They work as a single unit for the greater good, and a single ant will give it's life for the rest to prosper.  So in that respect, ants don't need to run from say a spider that is 200X its size.


Well empathy is required to care about those that suffer.  Although there are empathetic individuals, society as a whole is not empathetic yet.  Current society definitely doesn't care about the poor, so criticizing libertarians of the same thing is really a mute point.

Well put on the second point.  Once you remove obstacles that are largely implemented by the government, then the political job is done, and it's up to the individual to seize the opportunity and contribute to society.

The central bank will never be elected, right or wrong. 

The defining feature of this system is a grand alliance between the political and financial elites to jointly take wealth from everyone else by issuing financial assets and using public power to prop up their values.  Since these two groups don't trust each other, central banks are set up to institutionalize the terms of the alliance, to keep everyone honest.

If the central bank were fully elected, it might give in to populist instincts of every politician: refusing to bail banks out or to guarantee bank debt, for example.  Or it could indulge the government by allowing it to issue unlimited debt and endanger the whole system.  It's also not unheard of for governments to seize bank assets outright.

If no banker could be found to want to enter into this public/private partnership, the whole system would be seriously limited in scope, if not jeopardized.  The government needs the financial savvy of bankers to dream up assets that investors might believe in (however temporarily), and base them on government-issued assets (money and public debt), both to protect and to greatly increase the demand for those state assets.

The central bank also restrains bankers by regulating them and deciding to bail out or abandon a bank in trouble.

Of course, the very success of this system encourages the buildup of financial assets and eventually the weight of the buildup will break investor confidence, one way or another.  Major busts with serious consequences for the core country (US) happened just before the Great Depression and in 2008.

Spoken like a true douchebag

All of your reasoning is based around the assumption that physical determinism isn't true. If physical determinism ever got proven, the whole system would basically collapse, since it basically means there is no such thing as free will.

The thing, it's extremely naive and a coping mechanism, to think we have 100% free will. Someone born in a shitty place with no money and average genetics is most likely going to be stuck on their economical class for life, statistically it's a fact. If you get paid low and you can't barely make any savings because it goes to basic expenses such as food, electricity, etc, you are fucked and destined to remain poor. Thinking otherwise is just self delusion to sleep better at night.

Well with or without free will, the decisions you make are impacted by genetics and the environment that you're in.  Without free will, it is pure cause and effect.  So what we are talking about really is the environment, which will impact the decisions that everyone makes.

Think about how heavily conditioned kids are - from their parents, family, friends, from their school system, from media and advertising.  If we don't have free will and are just a distant echo of the big bang, wouldn't it be beneficial to back off on the intense conditioning?  With or without free will it will still change society.

So given the importance of the environment we are in, how does our current monetary system and government affect our environment?  Are resources distributed appropriately?  Do the most intelligent and benevolent and selfless people become leaders?  Not really.  But of the infinite possibilities, there is an environment where it would be so.

Those so called financial assets are just a scam to rob average people off their money, when majority of the people were robbed, there will be depression and recession. But now when money can be created out of nothing at will, banks don't need to do this kind of scam any more, they can raise those financial assets' value forever using money out of thin air. And as long as people are still using fiat money to measure value, that game can last forever

There is a live show of central bank election: Greece crisis. Greece must decide if they still honor ECB to be their central bank, or they can say bye bye to ECB and setup their own central bank. The Greek people did not elect their central bank, but they elected a government who might be capable of setting up a new central bank thus totally reset the whole system

My guess is that ECB will never let them go. Print tons of euro and give it to Greece is much easier than set them free and become financially independent. However, ECB will never gain anything from enslaving Greece: They are so cunning that they just default  ;D

If Greece are set free from ECB's control, they will be as good as heaven, then everyone will understand what is the root cause of Greece's problem

This thread has become so interesting now when many other aspects like politics and psychology have entered the discussion. I tends to believe the enlightening of the knowledge of money is the way to a more just society, and with the help of internet, human are much better positioned than 300 years ago, when John Law first designed his fiat money system and failed

Yes thats true, so make people smoke and drink but thats ok, but not the others. I think it will be legalized in the next 10-20 years there is just no way they can stall this much longer.

Of course the main obstacle is the church, most ultrareligious people just condemn it without even analyzing it. And there was no separation of church and state, its still the same entity in 90% of the countries.



Well its getting worse and worse, most males are without job, due to our magnificent money printing economy. And then obviously they will beat their wives and kids because of desperation. Some people are just too "alpha" and without a proper enviroment they go crazy.

And we wont see any improvement in that any time soon, as the economy will get only worse.



Yes but most animals are driven by instincts, and if that instinct is not made for survival then they will perish. Ants were evolved to be a collectivist society, the individual ant is easily sacrificed to hunt down a spider for the greater good.

Collectivism however is evil and its not good for people, there is no common good in humans, except survival, everything else is subjective.




No but really, i can understand why people are desperate in this tyranical society. But in a free society they would not have any excuses.

The fact that you cannot open your own restaurant chain because you require a 10m $ license from your slavemasters is a big obstacle, but in a free society everybody could do that. So a poor guy in a free society is only his own fault, whereas now its the governments fault.

I`m very sure determinism is not true. Because if determinism were true then you will have to ask who/what is determining things.

Some God is playing around with humans as their toys attached on strings. Whats the point of that?

Free will must be true otherwise nothing would make sense.

I'm afraid this won't work. If you somehow increase the awareness of humans at large, this should also increase the cunning of your "sociopaths" and their skills at fooling the general populace. So, in the end, we will most likely have absolutely the same result as we have today...

Thats nonsense, the sociopaths already control everything and they are already very cunning.

But if you make your average savage trendy leftist a well informed and peaceful person, then you (on average) increased the wisdom and understanding of the average people.

Now they will still fall for some smaller scams: psychics, alternative medicine, sorcerers and other frauds, but they wont fall for the bigger scams: democracy, voting and state.

If we take the premise of the environment being everything as the source of the outcome, it wouldn't matter because genetics would dictate how you react to said environment, which means that if you try to change the environment it was because your genetics allowed to do so, therefore rendering free will irrelevant as we know it.

I`ve heard that argument before, i`m not sure where but i think a philosopher said this once:
"The enviroment creates the organism and the organisms shape the enviroment"

It can be interpreted as a hybrid form of free and non-free will. I dont think its a black and white situation. Although i still think free will is as it is free, but even if you think otherwise, the mere thing that the enviroment is shaped (wind makes the mountain erosion, or ocean makes the beach) its still in some sense the organism having free will to shape the enviroment.

Therefore doesnt matter what perspective you look in from: Free will is valid in all cases.

Great point! That's the reason I don't really believe in totally free market, since the rule of "winner takes it all" applies not only to power, but also to intelligence. In a totally free market, the less intelligent people will become the slaves no matter how hard they work/think

And awareness can only reach certain level. Today's financial system is too complicated for normal people to understand, I have met several professors from different economy school, almost none of them really understand the essential of the fiat money system

So a better solution is to give people choice: People have the freedom to select whatever monetary system they like, so that if one system is total slavery, the opposite system might be the way to total freedom. No matter how rosy picture the central banks paint about their fiat money, if people using bitcoin get much better life, then the fiat money will get less and less attractive

If people have tried both alternatives and none of the choices will give them freedom, then most likely the problem is not located at the monetary system, but some other area. But at least they can give it a try for an alternative system, and I doubt most of the social problem is caused by fiat money, since it involves action of crime: Stealing and robbery, at GDP scale

HOW IS THAT NOT A FREE MARKET? Wtf are you talking about.

That is exactly the definiteion of free market. People voluntarly choosing between the products and services they want to use.

If 1 product turns out to be a scam they can embargo and boycott it.

If you introduce a regulator into the market then that itself will take advantage of it, as its much easier to corrupt the regulator than the market itself. Easier to pay off 1 state bureocrat than 10000000 customers dont you think?

Please rethink your logic, because its nonsense.

I understand your point, and if people really select bitcoin, it will be like the free market as you described. But the reality is that average people still don't choose bitcoin, maybe never will, because of the fiat money's domination in people's life: As long as they unconsciously use fiat money to measure value, it means fiat money is already rooted deeply in their thoughts. The free competition phase has already passed long time ago

And now when fiat money is dominating, it will use all the possible tools to crash the bitcoin if it ever becomes some kind of threat, currently banks don't care since bitcoin is just too small

I wouldn't despair.  In the long run, history is the story of increasing equality, increasing awareness, and improved institutions to guard against abuse by the powerful.  2000 years ago we had real slavery, and 500 years ago the powerful could burn people at the stake for having the wrong sort of faith.  Sociopaths will always be around, and in fact their lives might become better with the general progress of living standards, but average people also enjoy better lives, and under better social structures.

The problem that bitcoin is attempting to solve (successfully or not) had its source in great economic progress: the Renaissance demonstrated tremendous economic potential for humankind, but soon afterwards, the financially savvy and those with state power figured out a way to collect a good piece of that wealth and power without doing real work, by manipulating money.  When these two forces worked together inside a genuinely advanced country, as during the British Empire and later in 20th-century US, the system seems to last forever.

But this too, will pass.

Nonsense, most people still dont even heard about bitcoin if i go out the street and ask 50 people of age 15-25 i bet 90% of then havent heard of bitcoin, even if they stay in front of the PC all day. (and the 15-25 age group is usually the most aware, you wont see 80 year olds mining bitcoin lol)

Most people dont even know what money is, you cant expect the whole world to jump in the uncertain boat of bitcoin in 6 short years?

They still obey, and they do what they are told to, if the government would tomorrow say that bitcoin is now the official currency , then they would use it, but otherwise it will be a slow process.

Friends need to tell friends, and there must be many merchants, even local barbers or ministores, to spread awareness, that accept bitcoin.

And that could take another 10-15 years, in normal pace, of course unless the fiat system collapses in the next 1-5 years (which is also likely), then it will be much faster  :)

I wouldn't either, but surely not for the reasons you mentioned. We mostly don't have slavery by now since it is an inefficient form of economy at the present level of technology in the first place. Burning people at stake en masse is also economically counterproductive...

And I'm not certain about increasing equality

Most people are still dumb ,but the situation is favorable, the dogmatic world views are cripling and people start to become more peaceful in general.

Of course that can easily reverse, there is no permanent achievement in humanity, but i`m sure also our genetics have been improved in the last 2000 years.
I hope our tribal/primitive genes will be turned off from our DNA.

Other than that, hope that people will start to be not so ignorant.

If you are born in a certain socioeconomical status, it's almost mission impossible to escalate up the hierarchical pyramid. This is the sad statistic. Only a few make it. For a Mike Tyson to exist, the remaining 99% stay poor stuck on some gettho. That's whats up.

Most of the people are short sighted, the reason they accept internet is because they can get many ways of entertainment from it

But accepting bitcoin does not bring them any fun, and no extra income either, the only benefit they might get is from long term appreciation, which is only a concern for those who want to diversify their investment portfolio

This brings a chicken and egg problem: If average people does not benefit from bitcoin, thus have no motivation to acquire some, how could bitcoin become an attractive investment?

If they understand that fiat money is a scam, then they might consider other alternatives like gold or bitcoin. But in reality, the transition from gold based money creation to debt based money creation did not cause any chaos, it showed that almost no one cares about how fiat money is created, they only care about if price level is stable

Similarly, most of the people only cares if bitcoin can make them some quick fiat profit. There is no easy way to raise people's awareness above this threshold, unless something big like Cyprus hair-cut happens again

The purpose of decentralization is to make that structure flat, not hierarchical, thus there will be no centralized management, and no way to go higher since every one is at roughly the same height

You are out of line again. How can anybody not benefit from bitcoin?

Have you ever shopped online?

-An average online card based shopping has a 4-8% comission on it by start, with bitcoin its about 2-3 cents (0.0001-0.0002 BTC)
-An average online card based shopping takes 2-4 days, bitcoin takes 10 minutes
-Wire transfer shopping is even worse, up to 5% comission +25€, so if you want to buy a 0.5€ pencil online, you pay like 30€ for it.
-Card based shopping is full with frauds, and if you have like 2000€ on your bank account, the thief can easily rob it, and then it will take you 6-12 months of police and other legal procedures to recover the money (if it can be recovered).
-With bitcoin you can just put 0.5BTC on your "shopping address" and keep your other 100 BTC on a safe cold storage wallet, so even if somebody steals your wallet he gets away with less (more diversification & risk control with bitcoin)
-Bitcoin is available for minors too, in some countries 16 year old is already eligible for work, yet he cannot have his own bank account without parent agreement which is nonsense. If a 16 year old guy works online to get some extra cash in bitcoin, and he spends it wherever he wants, thats his money and the government should not restrict that at all.
-Banks are not the safest place to store money (see Cyprus govenrment confiscation, Pension looting and other governmental thefts that occur nowadays), your bitcoins on the otherhands are invulnerable to government theft.
-Bitcoin doesnt have global restrictions, open to P2P trading, I can sell p2p anything, otherwise if i would have bought it from a central store you need to pay VAT tax on it, p2p trading is not taxed, yet, and it's more efficient.
-Bitcoin doesn't discriminate racially or politically or religiously between users (see EU and USA embargoes on "enemy" countries)
-Bitcoin is free market trading, its monetary freedom, and capped supply, while fiat money is an inflated toilet paper money.
 and many more...

An average guy can easily understand this, dont need a 160 IQ to understand that the governmental-monetary system is highly flawed.

Yes, we all know these. But still, average Joe don't care, fiat money already become their standard of value since they were born, and as long as it works, they don't have enough motivation to switch to another totally unfamiliar system

True, bitcoin transaction fee is almost zero, but to exchange value in and out of bitcoin is not free, usually it costs much more than the 3-5% fee of credit cards, and it does not provide consumer protection like reversing the payment. So no clear advantage from payment point of view

The advantage is at long term storage and international remittance, which also requires user to have outstanding IT/Financial experiences in order to handle bitcoin security and exchange related risk

Fiat has established trust, and people are short sighted. Most importantly, because their income all comes in the form of fiat, they even fight to protect its value. Even banks printed money for future 100 years and bought everything valuable in the country, average people just don't care, as long as the price in supermarket and gas station does not rise. Of course they will gradually learn the truth from internet, but by the time they start to react, banks already bought the whole planet

You obviously don't shop online, since that guy is spreading blatant disinformation (mildly speaking). I buy things online a few times a month, so I know what I'm talking about. My last online purchase was just two hours ago, and I paid with my bank card (MasterCard Platinum, which is free if I keep a deposit of around 1,000$ in the bank). The payment was literally instant (as always), I didn't have to wait at all (and this is the same for Visas and MasterCards which I have). I paid 0% commission, and I will even get 1% cash-back, which I am paid every month for my purchases by the bank. Regarding stealing money from a bank card, this is hardly possible since I set daily limits, and every transaction online should be confirmed by a code sent to my phone by my bank. By the way, wire transfer is also free of charge for me (but this depends on a bank, of course)...

Just don't believe every word that you hear here

What you said makes sense.  I am assuming that the commission originally referenced would be for the seller of goods/services, and not the buyer.  Most credit cards around here also provide protection against theft.  So even if the card was stolen and used, the credit card company/bank would be liable and not the cardholder.  It's this way in Canada at least.

Furthermore, if the seller fails to deliver, with a bank card you can request a refund of a completed payment (money-back). Once I got into such a situation when the postal service lost my parcel (or it was stolen, idk). I tried to contact the seller for a refund, since the parcel de jure belongs to them until I take it at the post office. They refused, and I had to claim the money back through my bank. After the two week investigation by the bank I got my funds back, which were forcibly transferred from the seller's account in the acquiring bank to my account...

In short: Fiat-Money is a scam. Its probably the biggest scam ever. Or was that the gold-market? well not sure, but i am sure anything related to financial institutions and banks can be generally marked as "legal fraud".

Nope fiat money doesnt scam. Money for now is our currency that is stable but in the new era bitcoin will change it. It doesnt mean that it is fraud because this fiat money is legal but still bitcoin doesnt have a chance to proof it for now. May be just a couple of years or decade bitcoin will show the truth to us

the problem of bitcoin against fiat, is that bitcoin is too slow at catching up with fiat, if bitcoin really needs other decades to fight fiat, then we are screwed, because many technologies will come out by then and the chances of bitcoin to succeed will become much lower

and bank are indeed scamming with their fractional reserve/money printing system

That is But OBVIOUS.. humanity is enslaved by money, its a simple logic can we live without money??? And the answer is "NO" we cant. Basically it depends on what financial decisions you make?? If i make bad financial decisons then definitely it will be TROUBLE.

The concept of money is not a scam, but some financial institutions are scamming with the money.
For example saying you have money and vouching for somebody's credit while not having enough funds (like the banks do) is a scam.

And their words are unbelievable, they only sale's talk to you so that you would belive them and after you believe and you let your money with their hands, for surely you wouldn't back your money

I think i talked with you about this , are you that russian guy who has small comissions?

Well good luck for you bro that you live in the haven of BRICS, here in Europe we have thief banks controlled by the globalists that want to steal every penny from us.

I pay 6-7%  comission on everything I buy, that is 3-4% to Mastercard, 2% to the bank and another 1% sometimes the merchant to validate the transaction, so sometimes it can be even 10% (+ 25% VAT of course as the government likes to steal too).

Also the transaction can be instant, but it takes 3-4 days to clear from the account, that means  that i cant buy from the same place again until the order hasnt cleared. So if i want to buy lets say 1 flower online, and then i change my mind and want to buy another 1, i have to wait 3-4 days until i can buy again,

Yes thanks to those globalists that want to steal from all of us, so shut up dude, you are lucky that you dont live in this horrible place and that you have a country that cares about you, because where I live, they only steal from you   :(

You, as the cardholder, pay Mastercard a commission when you make a purchase?

Is that normal in your country?

In North America, I haven't heard of a credit card that charges the cardholder unless they have a running balance - but that is an interest charge rather than a commission.  The vendor pays the commission here.

1) Yes, they are thieves, I also had a Visa Card a few years ago, and it was the same, so its the same there too

2) I guess so, nobody complained so far, I must be pretty enlightened to realize what a global scam this is?

3) I`m using debit card not credit card (not really buying into the global credit ponzi scheme), but whatever, its still a fucking ripoff.

Not to mention 25% VAT from the government, I love those thieves too.

Humanity decided to live by the rules of capitalism.

Who would've made inventions like the internet or Bitcoin if we lived like animals?

Weird man.  What country are you in?

Here, not only is there no commission to pay for the cardholder, there are rewards programs for using it, including cash back.  So a lot of people including myself, use the credit card for almost every purchase, then pay off the balance, and receive the cash back without having any fees.

It does suck for the vendor, as they pay ~3% commission, but there usually isn't a difference in price based on method of payment, so credit card it is.

Debt spending is also largely encouraged here.  For those that don't pay the balance, it's like 18%+ interest charged.

I`d like to keep that private, but I live inside the European Maffia Union, so just a hint for you what it's life inside it.

Yes there are some promos where you get some cashback here too, but I opted those out because it's more like a scam,I knew a guy who get a cashback after purchasing from a physical store and now it's facing a civil lawsuit from the bank on some bogus "no refund policy"  because he later returned the product, but the cahsback cant be returned, yet the store had no problem with returning of the item (i think it was a lamp) , however since he purchased with the card it got an issue with his bank (even though the cashback should be a gift, looks like banks dont give out free money after all ,only scam you).

Not to talk about the governments VAT tax scam, just to keep prices high artificially, its disgusting.

Ah okay no worries.

My cash back is paid once a year, and takes into account net purchases (total purchases - total returns/refunds) when calculating the amount.  Some other added benefits are extended warranty, emergency auto assistance, and other types of insurance that most people don't use.

Yeah VAT or any consumption tax sucks, but I'd take a consumption tax over an income tax any day.  At least consumption tax is based on a purchase that an individual is willing to make (although basic needs purchases are always necessary).  There's not much you can do about income tax.

I`d rather have no tax at all, or better yet no government, but to be realistic in a tyrranycal world we live in today, the VAT tax would only make sense if all other taxes would be eliminated.

You see VAT tax is atleast an enviromentally friendly one (to slow down the rabbid consumption based economy), but then again we got fiat printed money, and loan based economy to boost consumerism, so it's really nonsense, on 1 hand you halt comsumption by taxing it, on the other hand you give out loans from counterfeited money to boost consumerism. What a joke this government is.  :D

You're not going to get a disagreement from me on not having tax, but that world is far from the socialist one we live in.  There are some things that I don't mind contributing to, like infrastructure, transportation systems, renewable energy, etc (all of that can also be done privately).  These are things that directly or indirectly benefit pretty much everyone, and making it more efficient would help everyone.  However a lot of the other bullshit responsibilities seem to fall under the government umbrella that I don't care for, and which are extremely expensive.

Now you live in some hole, so that you care not to say where exactly, but this in no case prevents you from making sweeping allegations, which, as it turns out, are not pertinent to the rest of the world? Good for you...

There will be depression/recession when the public realize the financial assets are way over-valued *and* this time the market wins because the authorities can no longer keep reality from being reflected by prices.

You should give people (and especially relative savvy, rich investors who tend to lead the way) more credit when it comes to realizing that currency can be over-valued too.  Money is just another financial asset.  When its value buys less and less, people always take notice and take action.  Your view of money being always trusted as a measure of value is likely rooted in the lack of obvious and severe consumer price inflation in the modern West (except for a brief period in Weimar Germany.)  This is a historically specific set of conditions, not a general one.  The immediate driver of the Great Depression was that Europeans, led by the rich, no longer trusted the value of their money and speculated in dollars and US stocks, as well as converting their cash to gold.

Indeed, i`m only annoyed with income tax, forced-by-gun-to-your-head-or-prison type social security and health care, and commercial/adminitrative regulation such as forced-by-gun-to-your-head-or-prison type accounting in business, and playing by government daddy's rules.

Eliminate those, and they you are left with property tax, tariffs, and other excises, which if it's pluralized, not 1 shitty government service on monopoly like electricity companies government run and cause always powerouts, then it would be very close to minarchism :)

After that we shall see, but man the income tax and the regulations are just a bullshit tyrranical and totally useless things  >:(

Good that you live in a country where you can be proud tolerate the government. Where I live i`m only getting robbed 80% of my income and get nothing back in return but shitty government services, more robbery taxing and lies inspiration, and propaganda "news".

Plus you get the 4-5 year crazy ritual where everyone goes into a box and puts a stamp on a toilet paper ,in a ceremony , invoking the God of the Governments, and praying to it to make things better.

Very crazy occult ritual this democracy is.  :o

But you can always renounce your citizenship, I guess. Do you live in France? If so, some prominent characters have already done just that (after their government imposed heavy taxes on the rich). So what are you waiting for?

No i`m not from france. And go where exactly? There is no cm^2 on earth that is not claimed by a fucking government. They even fight amongs those tiny islands in the pacific with 1-2 km^2, they are everywhere.

Some are better some are worse, but all of them want to control you and to steal your money, so there is not much alternative.

It will always be a matter of choosing between the two (actually many) evils. Indeed, it is much easier to blame a government, or aliens, or whatever rather than actually change something in your own life...

People often pay an annual fee. It all depends on which bank you go through. With my MasterCard, there is no annual fee, but when I was younger and building my credit, I couldn't qualify for a MasterCard without the fee.

Yeah that's true.  The basic credit cards usually have no fee.  The cards with higher rewards and protection usually do have a fee, but the bank waives the fee if you maintain a minimum balance.

I think my card is otherwise $99/year.  I'd have a very different view on it if I was incurring fees.  As it stands, I pay no fees and receive 1% cash back on all purchases.

It's time to move on trade relations.

Money is pure value.

Yes money is a pure value, but it is for now. So later after bitcoin have affected they surely money will slowly replace by bitcoin then it will affect all world to use this kind of payment. Just wait for that time to booming then all people will be affected where the new era is coming

There is a common misconception that money is not value, because it can not be eaten etc. But, all value is one individual's preference for one thing over another, which includes money. Therefore, money is value just like other things.

I agree that value is subjective, means utility and can be compared on the basis of an individual's preference of one thing over another. But I don't agree that money can be judged that simple. One of the fundamentals of the subjective value theory that you make reference to here is the notion of diminishing marginal utility. Money apparently doesn't conform to this notion, which can be explained only by the assumption that money doesn't possess value per se. It is just an intermediary for (or, rather, into) things that can be bought with it...

False again. Money is value, the proof is that some person at some point prefers the money to the thing. This happens every time someone sells something or a service. In a money economy, it in fact happens every time a trade is done, so it is exactly as common as a non-money transfer. A trade is normally a good or service one way, and money the other way.

This is not a proof (of money having value per se). Though I was hoping that you would address the issue that I raised in my post (since that would be a proof). I mean, the compliance (or lack thereof) between the notion of money having value as such and the law of diminishing marginal utility...

It is proof. Value is somebody prefering one thing over the other.

We could go on discussing the two types of value again, but this time I wanted to stress that money is value.

So you don't want to address the issue of the discrepancy that I pointed out, okay then. Would money have value to you if you could buy with it only things that you don't need (and couldn't barter with) and, consequently, couldn't that you do? I guess that it wouldn't. Therefore it is not money per se that has value but the value of things that you can buy with it, and only through these things that actually satisfy your needs money obtains its value...

And this pretty much explains the apparent contradiction between the law of diminishing marginal utility and money not conforming to it. If you still disagree, then you have to explain this non-conformance somehow

The two types of value is intrinsic value and exchange value. If you really hate the names of those two concepts, you can of course choose other names but if so i can not be bothered to follow the discussion anymore.

The intrinsic value is what you are after when you go to a shop and buy something. You need shoes, they sell shoes, and you go and buy a pair. No magic there.

The exchange value is the speculation that you can get something of intrinscic value in exchange. So money has the exchange value, which is fully speculative. So the if's and but's above is completely rational. If I can buy food tomorrow, what if I can not buy food tomorrow, possibly I can get only something that I don't fancy. Anywy, I speculate that I can get what I want tomorrow, therefore I keep some money for tomorrow, in stead of stuffing my refrigerator with something that can degrade, or what I maybe don't fancy tomorrow. Things with intrinsic value is good, but it depends on the circumstances, maybe what is valuable today is not so tomorrow. Therefore I keep something that is not directly useful, but pure value, for tomorrow.

I don't understand what you are talking about. If you mean that money has value since it has utility in allowing an individual to choose what to buy and what not to buy, today or tomorrow, this still fails the marginal utility test (since this value is also subjective). You will have to overcome this (which you evidently shrink from, despite my insistence), otherwise we should agree that this utility is not money's "intrinsic" value. You made a claim and the proof is on you..

And I'm not choosing other names, where did you get this?

Your words are nonsensical to me.

I remain entirely in the scope of the subjective value theory, and am using its terminology and notions. If you follow it too, then you have to deal with what I say (and not in the way you actually do). If you don't, then, I'm afraid, you have to explain your theory more clearly. I don't get it...

We don't have to consider why people choose, just that they do choose. By the way, you got the "intrinsic" word wrong, opposite, in fact. The title is "Re: Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it". Money is value, real value, pure value, just like the things you need to survive or just want to have, those with the intrinsic value. So even if the money does not have intrinsic value, it has value, real value, and we are not enslaved by it.

I said that I don't understand what you mean by money having "real" value. Instead of explaining it clearly, you are trying to hang on me using the word "intrinsic" incorrectly. As you might have noticed, I used it only once, and double quoted it at that. So now you have to explain to me how I got it wrong, it was your claim after all...

And you still didn't confess what economic school regarding value you adhere to (so as to avoid further confusion)

Essentially debt is created on credit,other wise banks/finances wouldn't exist,bearing in mind exports/imports,infrastrcture development,employment wages,passing bills,taxes ,interest rates,rebates..etc are the lifeline of a developing country, there is a fine balance in maintaining currency regulations, so if you were to make everyone poor and the value of money to be infinite,an economy would cease to exist

By this interpretation (which I don't disagree with), cash is effectively representative money with the caveat that cash is not guaranteed to be redeemable for any arbitrary amount, instead relying on market functions. Cash itself is worthless, but it represents X units of "anything and everything" (at least within the issuing country, dependent on their legal tender laws, if any!). Since "whatever we want" is basically the most maximally valuable commodity in the Universe, cash is maximally valuable to everyone (unlike, say, camels or silver nuggets), but only while it represents "whatever we want."

The real issue with the traditional definition of representative currency is that it MUST be legal tender for it to be maximally valuable -- I really don't give half a shit about being able to redeem it for a silver nugget because
1) I have no direct use for silver nuggets and don't want the clutter (there's no single item on Earth I want in such quantity that I'd want to be able to spend my net worth on owning... except maybe Tesla Powerwalls - those things are fucking amazing).
2) in the event of some monetary disaster where I'd actually consider redeeming cash for nuggets, I presume the chance of the nuggets actually being there is very low.

Combined, this makes representative currency (by traditional definition) a giant waste of resources. If the best use we can find for gold, silver, rhodium, and whatever is storing them in a warehouse, aliens should kill us all right now. Similarly, using useful items as a medium of exchange is terrible. -So we use relatively useless items. Cash is fantastic with regards to work efficiency because the paper, fabrics, and polymers we use to make fiat in the world has negligible value (not completely the case with all the semi-effective anti-counterfeiting shit built in these days, but the value's still very low). Who really gives a shit if a bank is storing $10,000,000,000 in nominal value using $291.50 in actual material costs (the actual cost of manufacturing the bills) -- I mean, that's pretty cool that we've been able to add what we were using as money back into the productive economy - but it left us open to policy abuse by the issuers, which turned out to be governments (which is probably far better than banks, at least), so I see bitcoin as the final evolution here and putting the final nail in the coffin of using otherwise-useful resources as something to keep in your pocket or a warehouse. "Redeemable" (if you trust the issuer... a LOT) crypto put a bit of a twist on that, but I don't honestly believe it has any place in the mainstream.

Money is value but at a global level... namely, you may think something is absolutely worth shit nothing, but the market dictates that it's worth 1000 (example: some dodgy painting by one of those high cache abstract painters).
So it's not "pure value", it's perceived value, and a lot of the times the markets are trigged anyway, so it's not a pure "global conscience value", it's a rigged one.

Money isnt really a imaginary concept.

If it wasnt for a fiat system in place, what you expect people to barter and be okay with it? The only reason why the system is in place is to avoid the nonsense of bartering, but it just happens that the banks also have the ability to cash out as well since they offered it.

It is pure value, in the sense that you can not point to anything in particular it can do for you directly.

Take all things you can think of, that has value, together, and try to remove the particulars, and extract what the things have in common. You can think of that also as pure value.

Everyone has a choice, and the only way to be out of the enslavement is hacking your life.

Either if its eating and making money, social skills these are all your areas that most will never even consider until their late age.

Eating - can be starting with cold press juice, outsource workers for personal stuff, like VA`s, the list goes on.

Since value is one individual's preference for one thing over another, value creation becomes:

To make something or do something that someone else is willing to pay for.

Considering this, no youth should be afraid to not being able to support himself/herself in the future.

That's a good question

The diminishing marginal utility still applies to fiat money, but because fiat money have universal acceptance (In fact only domestically), can buy you anything, then the diminishing marginal utility will apply to all the things combined together, thus very difficult to observe for average household. You need much larger amount to see the effect

Imagine that you have 100 trillion dollar, adding another 100 trillion dollar is almost useless to you, because it does not buy you any more things than 100 trillion dollar can do. In fact for 50 trillion dollars you might already run out of the things that you can buy in the whole world (Many things are not for sale), this is the problem that central banks are facing right now

This is similar to: When you are very hungry, the first potato will worth almost the same as the second potato to you, and the third... only after eating 5 potatoes, the extra potato will show the effect of diminishing marginal utility

You have also mentioned that when the money does not grant you more ability to buy, it will have diminishing marginal utility. The fiat money's value is very tightly related to the acceptance

The problem is not about the cost, it is about the arbitraging behavior related to the money. This has already been observed on many alt-coins, especially POS coins

If a money unit cost $291.5 to make, but command a market price at 10 billion dollars, thus become a presentation of value, then what will happen? Everyone will try to produce this money and use its market value to purchase other things, because they can make a quick profit right away. This will raise the competition in money creation and raise its cost, at mean time anyone accepting this money will only be willing to exchange similar value of $291.5, no more

People will be forced to accept a market price of $10B if they are not allowed to produce this money, that's how fiat works today. And that's the reason it is called monopole money: Only banks allowed to make money at a cost of $291.5 and spend it like 10 billion. But for a money that everyone can make like bitcoin, its production cost will always be close to its market value, due to arbitraging

It is imaginary, first comes the concept, then the realization in the physical world. The concept of ideal money is: There is something special that is accepted by EVERYONE in commercial activities and have relatively stable purchasing power over a period of time. As long as these 2 conditions can be met, it is money

So, first came cows and wheat, which was needed by almost everyone when food supply was still not sufficient. Then came gold. The strange thing is that gold is not needed by everyone but still became money thousands of years ago. I think this has something to do with Sovereign power. In old Egypt, wheat is the money, while gold were largely used for decoration. If many people don't feel gold is any more meaningful than some shinny stones they occasionally find in the rocks, then the gold usage as money is very likely to be a decision from the top

You could just say that the money has no value by itself, and the money an individual has represents the amount of goods that he can have. Thereby you can exclude money out of the equation completely and would lose almost nothing from the picture. If we consider value as utility, then money has some utility to us by and of itself, since it gives us the possibility to choose what to buy (and what not) as well as postpone buying altogether. Whether this utility abides by the law of diminishing marginal utility (i.e. diminishes with the amount of money an individual has) remains to be seen...

Personally, I don't think that it does, therefore there is room for doubt about the nature of this utility

Red: But you can't say that.  Money does not represent some or any amount of goods. When you have money, you and the one you want to trade with, still have to consider the preference of money over the goods. There is no requiring of goods for money, it is all speculation of what you will be able to trade them for. There is no such thing as going into a shop and just buy, either you accept the shop owners offer, or you make an offer that he might accept. This point is crucial and makes money different from debt, or the debt-based gift economy.

I think it does, but since money can purchase almost everything, and human's demand are so many, you are actually asking wether diminishing marginal utility applies to all the human's demand added together. That is much more complicated than asking the same question for a single utility like bread or milk

In fact, even with 100 utilities, you might run into a problem that the demand appears to be unlimited due to you have less time to consume: Even if you spend all day playing games and watching new movies, you might end up with missing out more and more games and films, not because you don't like them, just because you don't have time (And generally economy theories are not working any more in an environment that has abundant supply)


And you can not exclude the money out of the equation. Without money, you will lose the means to access any other utilities. This transaction demand is also what gives fiat money value, and it enabled most of the commercial activities

Without merchant acceptance, the money is like you described, has no value, but the universal acceptance itself, although does not generate any utility, injected value for currency temporarily until the next trade happens

A good example: In 2009 North Korean suddenly announced that the old currency will not be allowed in circulation, thus anyone holding the old currency immediately lost most of the purchasing power of those currency. The value of those currency suddenly disappeared because the acceptance is removed nation wide

One bitcoin private key without blockchain is totally useless, but once it is in the network, can be transferred between people, some people will start to accept it as a payment method, then it start to have its monetary value. Similarly, fiat money without merchant acceptance is also useless

It's interesting you compare money to a supply and demand situation. The demand for money and the supply for money is both infinite. Money is like a scalar quantity. It's always constant. It's used by us humans to put a value on a product or service. It's the root of any economy. For a supply and demand to exist, you need to have money to drive it. I agree that it's an imaginary concept, but it's something that we are so dependent on because it puts a crystallized value on something.

Well what else are we going to use? I mean, theoretically if the money wasnt there, I really see no replacement.

The dollar and the fiat system has been here for longer then anyone can think of. It actually roots back way 1000 AD. I know for fact though bitcoin wont replace the current system, but it`ll be used for something else.

Before we continue, I think, you should substantiate your previous claim about how I misunderstood the word "intrinsic" in respect to money. It is not something that you could say and get away with, so you'd better first take responsibility for your words...

And I still don't understand what you mean

You didn't understand my point. I am not talking about people's unlimited demands or their needs. I mean the utility of money over barter (i.e. not the utility of things that can be bought with money). With barter you don't have as many options as with money. What you have for exchange may quickly deteriorate, other people may not be interested in that, you can't postpone consumption, and so on...

In this way money is not an abstract imaginary concept in the sense it is meant in this topic

Intrinsic, by and in itself, with regard to money, is the direct use value. If you can eat it, for example it has intrinsic value. Gold has some intrinsic value, since it can be used in electronics and for pretty things (the use for pretty things can be somewhat foggy, because the reason for carrying a gold bracelet may not only be for decoration, but also for the money reserve).

The exchange value is value not for the owner directly, but because someone else may demand it, again not for the direct use, but for someone else again ... ad infinitum. It is the exchange value, or money value, or speculative value (because you have it now, and you speculate that others will demand it later).

Pure value is things that have only money value, it is hard to find between common things, fiat money comes close, bitcoin even closer.

So the money does not represent useful goods in the world, or represent value, it is value, not something exact, but dependent on the demand for the money in the market. Demand, again, has it's roots in needs and wants, but comes into existence when someone acts by offering something for the money (or accepts a money offer for something else (including another type of money)).

 

You still didn't say how I misunderstood the word, you're just saying how you understand it. You see it is always risky to say things like that, since you may be asked to explain how I (or anyone else for that matter) understood it (even incorrectly), that is, explain my point. I'm all ears, go ahead...

Looking back, it seems you used the word "value as such", not intrinsic, but I read it as the same concept.

You want to discuss diminishing marginal utility, which is okay. It is a stretch to use that meme in regard to money, since they have no direct utility, but I guess you could apply it to value itself if it is large enough, except it does not seem to work that way in practice. The very rich seem to be just as eager to keep and expand their wealth as a poor one. Anyway it does not touch the problem of money value being real, or representing what you migh get for the money. Ah...It seems this was your point. Ok I get it. Money value does not seem to diminish, therefore there is a fundamental difference. I am ok with that, except that the money value is not therefore in any way unreal, or representing something else. The difference is just the exchange value contra the direct use value, general value contra the more specific. Maybe we are mostly in agreement.

Hitherto I have considered the diminishing marginal utility as a different, not uninteresting but rather obvious, concept. The same with the subjective contra objective value discussions that comes up from time to time.

Edit:
Rethinking the diminishing marginal utility, for these examples to work, maybe it should be renamed to diminishing marginal value...:

Someone could think that

I have enough money, therefore I don't need to work overtime.

I reduce my work ours, because I prefer more of my own time to money.

I could get by without a new car, but I have enough money, so why not.


The example with the very rich, could be regarded as an obsession, or a delution (they think they are not economically safe, but they really are), or as a competition, to be richer than most everyone, just like a guy who collects beer bottle capsules. The only way to get in the paper is to be the one who have most, meaning the next capsule is worth more than each previous.

End rant... it can be said that money value also diminishes when you have more.

As you should have known by now (since we had discussed similar issues previously), I maintain the idea that nothing has intrinsic value, all value being subjective. That's why I double-quoted the word. And yes, I meant just that, "direct use value" in your speak, something that you can eat, figuratively speaking in respect to money indeed (the utility of money per se I explained before). Regarding your "exchange value" (it seems that now I get what you mean), you describe not value but the universal machinery which makes exchange possible ("an individual's preference for one thing over another"), irrespective of money. If money didn't represent things which can be bought with it, the exchange with money as an intermediary wouldn't be possible. In fact, the very concept of money wouldn't be possible if things didn't have what you call "exchange value", since there would be no exchange in the first place (even without money). Money just represents this "exchange value" of things. This is being proven by the fact that any exchange through money (goods-money-goods) can be done directly, i.e. without money (goods-goods), therefore the value of money is not in the exchange itself...

Money has "direct" utility (note that I am double-quoting the word direct, since it makes no sense), which I explained earlier. And exactly towards this utility I was suggesting to apply the law of diminishing marginal utility. As i said, I don't think that the utility of money ("direct use value") abides by this law, but I haven't given this idea much thought myself. In fact, I was hoping that someone would pick it up and give us a proof (or a rebuttal) that I would just agree with...

I'm using your terminology but it is superfluous and only further confuses things ("direct use value", "exchange value", and possible meanings of the word value)

Here we go again. You may be correct, but using inaccurate, random definitions. How is it possible to regard intrinsic as contrary to subjective?

Why should I repeat it again that there is no such word (intrinsic) in my understanding? I don't consider intrinsic as contrary to subjective, I am just saying that this word makes no sense since all value is subjective. I'm using your words as you mean them (intrinsic as in "something you can eat"), though I specifically double-quote them. But you then blame me that they are "inaccurate, random definitions". They are your definitions, not mine...

Personally, I wouldn't use the word value at all (since it has very vague meaning). There is already precise term, i.e. utility

Here we go again. How can it be possible for money to have direct utility, when you have in detail described what direct utility is ("something that you can eat, figuratively speaking"). How can direct not be a useful word. Either you can utilize the money directly, or you have to make a trade before you can utilize the value? The trade is the limit between the direct and indirect utility.  Indirect utility -> trade -> direct utility. You transform the indirect value of the money to something useful using a trade.

Agreed. I should've phrased that better. One of the coolest features of Bitcoin is that it can always be produced, but the amount of effort put into minting scaled up with price and we had a very low price for a long time In The Beginning - so most of our coins were mined for very little effort (relative to today's amount of work required). Well over half of the bitcoins are already staked, so we get the same arbitrage effect you describe without having had to pour many, many more $millions (billions?) into minting these coins as we would have if we started mining at the current difficulty.

Once again, there is no direct or indirect value, no direct or indirect utility. All utility is "direct" by definition, and money has such, though not in exchange where it just represents value (utility) of things that can be bought with it. These are the words that you use, not me. I just repeat them after you in an effort to explain things in your terms, and then you are trying to blame me for using them. Obviously, you are blaming the wrong person. Why are you so eagerly trying to obfuscate matters?

Is there not a concept "value for direct use" either, in your understanding? It is basically the same, but intrinsic "in itself" captures it better and is the word generally used for the concept in the literature. Objective, on the other hand, which no value is (consistent with value being subjective, an antonym to subjective), means that the value is disconnected from the person valuing it.

So a thing is valueable, not objectively, because the person valuing it is not an uninterested bystander, it is not other persons who value it, but the subject, the person making the choice. At the same time it is valueable by and in itself, because it is traits with the thing itself, its calory content, it's taste, it's color, it's structure and so on that the subject takes into account while evaluating. Money, being green sometimes, it does not matter, it is not those intrinsic traits that give it value. Only the speculation that others will prefer it in some future trade.

I probably waste my time with this.

As I said, all value is subjective. To me, there is no difference between "value for direct use" or "value for indirect use", it is all the same subjectively. These terms only confuse things and are a cause of futile debates, which this argument obviously confirms. Anything can be of utility to an individual, or not. If it is, then it can be of less utility than something else, or of more. The difference in utility (strictly speaking, in marginal utility) is the basis for exchange, without it no exchange between people would be possible at all (with or without money)...

Such objective qualities as caloric content, taste, color and whatnot are no concern of economics unless they serve as a basis for subjective valuation by a person making choice

Trying again: A possible test for direct and indirect, is when you are stuck alone on an island with no hope ever of seing another human being. You have a sack of potatoes, a hammer, a bunch of dollar notes, some bitcoins (no internet, ever), the winter is coming and your hope of survival into old age is slim, but present. What has value of those things to you now? When you can not trade, now or in the future, only the direct use value is left.

Your (or mine, for that matter) subjective valuation of things does depend on the circumstances, the word itself tells it all. In fact, the notion of marginal utility is based entirely on that, i.e. external conditions, right here right now. In the situation of a lonely island the utility of potatoes will indeed be higher than that of bitcoins (the utility of the latter will evidently be next to nothing). Why are you still trying to put me into your system of thinking? How many times should I repeat that I don't use these notions (direct and indirect use values), they are pretty much meaningless to me (though I understand what you mean). I consider them only confusing things, not clarifying them...

Strictly speaking, this state of matters (a single individual on a desolate island) is beyond the scope of economics as a science altogether, but the notion of subjective valuation (marginal utility) is still fully applicable here

Ok, I guess you mean the utility of enable transaction. Money indeed brings much more convenience than barter, but I think that the utility of transaction itself does not have any value, since it is some kind of knowledge. When it is discovered, it become free for everyone to use, it can be duplicated endlessly, you just need to find enough people to agree on one or several transaction medium

If you are living in a total barter society, the invention of money will increase the commercial activities a lot, thus bring great value. But in today's society, when the technology is already available, more types of money will not create more value (That's definitely diminishing marginal utility). Fiat money has lost the ability to store value in a relatively long time, thus some other type of money like bitcoin might come to replace its place in this specific area. But overall there are only 2 utilities of money: Enable universal transaction and maintain purchasing power for a long time

Unable to discuss.

So you are essentially saying that the transactional utility of money is nullified (its marginal part), that is, any greater amount of money doesn't add up to it. Okay, this doesn't look contradictory, but this in no case means that the concept of money is useless. It is like saying that the air we breathe is worthless since its marginal utility is zero...

Exactly, knowledge is of course useful, and those deep knowledge can still have value due to years of time needed to learn. But the knowledge of enable transaction using money is very simple, almost a known fact

We can also observe this on bitcoin: Bitcoin is an invention that enabled so many things that can not be done before, like anti-copy and electronically transfer ownership without third party, so it has certain great utilities. But the blockchain technology can be widely spread, thus all the alt-coin will be able to enable exactly the same things, and those alt-coins will worth a little, since their marginal utility over bitcoin is minimal

Similarly, since fiat money already exists, most of the people can do transactions with fiat money, bitcoin does not really provide extra benefit in enabling transactions domestically. But it enabled instant international transactions, and long term store of value due to expansionary monetary policy around the world, that is the area it is mostly demanded today

Money isn't an "imaginary" concept....It's a very real method of engaging in the exchange of goods and services in the most efficient manner possible.  The vehicle by which that transaction is conducted was never intended to be the most important aspect of the transaction; however, that is exactly what it has become....and well...bitcoin changes things....We have to start re-thinking the concept now.

Money is merely the actualization of the one thing coveted by humans since the dawn of man: power. It serves to reinforce the illusion that power is the defining trait that pervades this entire reality.