The Money Illusion

[Artemis3]

Print money will likely almost never become a thing of the past, at least not till we reach a point where absolutely everyone is connected on an almost completely reliable network that experiences no downtime. That, and you also have to consider the issues that could be presented by a power grid outage, especially when one considers the extreme vulnerabilities that national power grids have. Tons of grids are networked together and the infrastructure that maintains them is not the greatest. If those go down for whatever reason (solar storm being the chief potential issue), then everything gets scuffed. There will always be a need and use for paper money, there will never be a true replacement for those pay methods in the digital age.

That and some people just like not having a record of where they spend their money. I personally don't care too much about it, but to each their own.

From a country that is becoming accustomed to physical money scarcity (ie. cashless by force, not by choice) i can tell you that it actually IS possible, but you lose flexibility and have to learn new things, such as planning in advance how much "money" are you going to use that day before moving away to some place without connectivity.

In our case, its the very old debit card system and a network of (stupidly dial up) pads to validate transactions at hopping 1200bps (quite retro indeed). Funny thing is some people actually found how to make the things work over WAN, but its kept very low profile as the banks are intentionally using dial up to "slow down" the transactions...

Get into a socialist central planned economy, and you will learn even weirder things...

Completely reliable network? NO downtimes? LOL. Get used to: Today we won't be able to buy food here, or, "there is no system/electricity/internet". But your physical money (if you have any left) won't be enough to buy a candy...

Actually i have been to "developed" (capitalist) countries and connectivity was nearly 100%, at least in places with other humans...

"Solar storm" could be compared to, that month (March 2019) where we spent many days without continuous electricity. Its survivable, been there, done that. We even experienced some strange phenomenon reminiscent of the past, such as the neighbors coming out to socialize with others during daylight kids playing with others away from any digital gadgets, etc. The nights were scary tough, especially in the less safe areas.

[planet-crypto]

Wow! This is actually an eye-opener video on money, currency and the big lie that in the past and into the present being sold into the people. The real money is always gold and silver as all fiat monies in the past not one ever survived. As many governments all over the world are now prone to solved their problems by printing more and more paper money, inflation is eating up the purchasing power of the people. As the money in circulation increases, the lesser the people get. Now, am thinking how can this be connected to bitcoin. Well, bitcoin is now considered to be the digital gold and just like bitcoin it is essentially limited and can function as money and as store of value.

After considerable research into this topic, we have reached similar conclusions, but not identical. Remember that money by definition is "a medium of exchange". This means, anything that becomes a medium of exchange is by definition money, and we have seen historically, the evolution of money from Wheat (Commodity), to Gold/Silver/ to Fiat, and now we are on the cusp of et another evolution of money, cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin, for example, is being used as a medium of exchange across multiple platforms, it is by definition money.

If you find this interesting, I'm sure you'll like this video I uploaded covering these topics. It is intended for Hindi/Urdu speaking members though.

Title: This is the REASON why Bitcoin is MONEY (for Hindi/Urdu)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEnC-qVyG0Q

[benjamin07]

My take on the series:

1. Good work, especially how Episode 8 was filmed over several years!
2. It is still an advertisement nevertheless for gold and silver; why not platinum?
3. Gold is indeed more resilient than crypto in apocalyptic event, when there is no more internet.
4. He fails to mention that buying Gold is a scam: there is only so much gold in the reserves and there are claims that the same gold has been sold many times over. That is, if everyone asks for their physical gold in bullion, 90% will be told sorry but there is no actual physical gold, you only bought numbers.
5. In the more likely event of robbery / assault etc rather than apocalyptic event: crypto is much more resilient. You can make 10 copies of your wallet, you can't duplicate gold
6. This is my main take: he states in various instances that Bankers don't know the difference between this and that, even some fundamental monetary concepts. This is furthest from the truth, bankers are almost Trump smart, and they know exactly what they are doing.
7. He goes on to contradict himself about the federal reserve not being part of government, whereas the the single task of the federal reserve is to prevent politicians from keep promising prosperity today at the expense of future generations.
8. What he explains very well is how the system must inevitably collapse under its own weight: where he shows how the debt ceiling keeps getting raised (each time for the last time), there is no escape from this in the current framework and the system will inevitably collapse as it makes itself worthless every inch of the way.
9. I think he made a big mistake with mixing hash graphs with bitcoin. Hashgraphs are very good inside one organisation, where it is none of a Microsoft's employee's business to peek through the transaction between Google employees, for example. It is a solution in-between anonymity coins where the ledger is open only to the members of the group but mean nothing to an outsider.

Overall score 6 / 10