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by marzipan 3146 days ago
In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor.

So banks would be defined as not real economy since they are transacting in debt, savings, and other instruments that exist on balance sheets, while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.

2 comments

> In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined

What century was that? I think financial services fit very well into the proper functioning of the real world. I believe it does provide very 'real' value and I'm ready to disagree with the definition of 'real value'.

>while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.

Bitcoin mining isn't competing with the wealth transaction part, but the wealth creation part. The wealth transaction part was secured a long time ago and now there are efforts to make it more efficient without dealing with the race for creation - like Lightning Network.

Did you mean to reply to the parent?