Fiat Money Is Hard Money, It Is A Harder Kind Of Fiat Currency
This Op-Ed article was written by Yellow in response to Shinobi's article on how Bitcoin is Fiat
Fiat Is Hard Money. Now go ahead, take the time you need to get it out of your system. Breath deeply. Blood pressure still up? Okay, let’s try this then.
What does Hard Money mean? Hard Money refers to a form of currency that is backed by a tangible asset. Hard Money is given value by the authority of governments that issue them but mostly by that asset that is backing them. They have value because the State decides they have value but also because everyone accepts that asset backing it that it has value. So how is Fiat hard money?
A king waives his hand and gives fiat value. But there is no King of Hard money. Right? Wrong. It’s the same King plus all of us that give it value due to the already existing value we giving to the asset that it's backing it.
We collectively give value to hard money through our decision to use it. We bring it into existence through our collective arbitrary decision. Despite all the memes and descriptions of Gold for example as hard money, it is by no means a common-deity. Hard Money has no distinct use-value and exchange-value. It is not a physical raw material that has any use case on the survival of humans like food, air or water. It’s a virus of pretending value that sits on your mind. And mine. And everyone else's.
The only reason hard money is even a coherent singular thing in the first place is because of everyone's archetypical subconscious decision to attribute to it any kind of value. Without that, hard money would be what it truly is, just a thing you can't eat, drink or inhale, thus it wouldn't have any value.
Its use-value is its exchange archetypical value. They are two sides of the same coin, brought into existence purely through a collective fiat decree.
Fiat might not be scarce, it might not be finite in supply, it might not be all these things with potential to change economic incentives globally. But it is also hard money. And that's because hard money also isn't all the above. All the above ,everything it is, exists purely because of our collective and arbitrary decision to make it exist.
Fiat is the world’s first non scarce non finite hard money.
Note from the editor: It appears Shinobi has not been listening to 40 hours a week of Bitcoin podcasts and it shows.
