[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.

[carlmr]

That counts for crypto as well though. If your phone bill is in crypto, and society believes (!) in crypto, then you might have society enforcing it's beliefs with the full force of the law.

I.e. imaginary.

Your phone bill is just another level of abstraction on top of the USD imagination.

In the middle ages witches were believed to be real by enough people to burn them on the stake. The full power of the state was behind this. Unless there's scientific evidence of sorcery now I think witches are imaginary.

It doesn't make the burning sensation less real.

[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.