[donkeyd]

There's a lot of crypto shills that want to scare people into thinking fiat will inevitably fail, so people buy their imaginary currency.

[matheusmoreira]

The "shills" are not wrong. Every single currency that ever existed went to zero. The USD will be no exception. Honestly, BTC will be no exception either.

[Dylan16807]

"Everything fails eventually" isn't what the "shills" are talking about.

[dragonwriter]

> Every single currency that ever existed went to zero

False, and you give two examples that disprove the claim:

> The USD will be no exception. Honestly, BTC will be no exception either.

See, that’s two that have not gone to zero (there ate lots more), but which you merely conjecture will.

[lowkey]

The US dollar has lost 99% of its purchasing power since the creation of the Federal Reserve.

The minimum wage in the US in 1964 was $1.25/hour. Notably those five quarters were 90% silver worth about $20 US today.

The British Pound Sterling originally referred to £1 being exchangeable for 1 pound of sterling silver or 1/270th of it’s original value.

It’s technically true that they haven’t gone to literally zero, but I would hazard to say it is close enough.

[carlmr]

>so people buy their imaginary currency.

While I think you're correct regarding the crypto bros, every fiat currency is imaginary.

[giantrobot]

I can pay my non-imaginary taxes with dollars. All my other bills also helpfully accept dollars. This gives dollars a useful non-imaginary quality crypto does not have.

[carlmr]

It's still imaginary. It's belief-based. Just living in the imaginary world of a lot more people than crypto.

[giantrobot]

There's a handful of objectively valuable things like air, water, and food which I literally cannot live without. The value of pretty much anything else is imaginary because it's subjective.

The value of cryptocurrency is just far more imaginary than dollars, euros, or even gold.

[lamontcg]

You could in fact try to opt-out of participating in the US economy even if you live here. That would be very difficult though.

Generally at some point a person wants to get some goods and services from their neighbors and barter only goes so far.

The fact that you are in a society with 330M other people who all use the same "imaginary" currency makes it incredibly sticky.

[carlmr]

>The fact that you are in a society with 330M other people who all use the same "imaginary" currency makes it incredibly sticky.

Exactly what I said. It's imaginary, just that it's a collective imagination.

[lamontcg]

You can believe that phone bills are a purely imaginary human construct that has no physical meaning and your phone will still stop working when you stop paying them.

At some point these things we conjure up out of our collective imagination are every bit as real as the ground hitting you if you jump off a building.

[prottog]

> every fiat currency is imaginary.

Well, the USD is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States government" which, however you may feel about it, isn't imaginary. Each dollar is a claim to a piece of output of the world's largest economy with the strongest military.

[paxys]

The US government and US military are very far from imaginary.

[carlmr]

It's collective imagination of the worth of the US dollar.