[dllu]

A Yuval Noah Harari quote I quite enjoy:

> Indeed, money is probably the most successful fiction ever invented by humans. Not all people believe in God, or in human rights, or in the United States of America. But everybody believes in money, and everybody believes in the dollar bill. Even Osama bin Laden. He hated American religion, American politics and American culture — but he was quite fond of American dollars. He had no objection to that story.

[_7fvc]

I think Harari is wrong when he suggested gold is a collective fiction. The first metal humans worked with was gold. This happened 40k years ago. Through gold, humans accumulated knowledge and invented metal technologies. We then progressed through metal ages, e.g., Bronze Age, Iron Age. Gold was an icon of metal technologies. It's not just a fiction.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/29/how-gold-became-money.h...

[Nasrudith]

And paper money really exists as a physical thing and required technological and societal advancement to exist. Currency is an abstracting fiction to make trade easier. Confusingly they are separate in the same way money has no utility in itself but is portable and may easily be exchanged giving it high utility.

[_7fvc]

I think paper money is a novelty. It's a good invention. It detaches the concept of money from gold. It makes money easily transported. But that can run amok. The Gold Standard was in place to protect societies from detaching too far from physical reality. "Good" paper money should be backed by physical reality. The US has a large gold reserve, education, research, military etc. But we're now at the verge of running amok with paper money.