Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
iopq@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up
Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It rebounding and crashing by hundreds in value like a meth head on caffeinated cocaine laced with LSD is what doesn’t make it a currency.
No one wants a shit currency where one day a donut costs 1000 and the next 2000 and on the weekend it’s either 599 or 3999.
That’s why it’s at best a speculative asset, except it’s dumber than that because it’s intangible. It’s like the long term stupidity of fiat mixed with insane instability, all while using way more resources.
iopq@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Same thing happened to the Argentine peso, let’s not pretend if you make a government currency it’s magically stable
Lumisal@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The Argentine peso crashed and then stayed down. That’s actually a sign of stability, because it’s remaining at a constant, not jumping up and down wildly.
It didn’t crash only to go back to original value to the decrease by half and undulate like a wave, like Bitcoin and other crypto does.