Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tl2do 101 days ago
This reminds me of Gresham's Law: "bad money drives out good." But here, the result is inverted—efficient replicators drive out the less efficient.
2 comments

Well, (somewhat tongue-in-cheek,) one of the defining characteristics of "good money" is that it is very inefficient to replicate!

(Several places online list "durability; portability; divisibility; scarcity; fungibility; and acceptability" as the key characteristics of "good money." Difficulty-of-replication pertains to the "scarcity" characteristic: if it's easy to duplicate, that makes it "bad" money, not "good" money.)

Bad money only drives out good money under fiat. Absent legal tender laws, the opposite is true.