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0 pointsdijit28d ago0 comments

yeah, it's worse.

Someone trips over a cable and now your region of the world can't recognise that you have any wealth of any kind.

Or, you can get debanked by the state. :)

Hard to do that with coinage- but you can have your coinage destroyed in a fire (or via theft, of course).

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I respectfully disagree, but each with their own personal annoyances.

Strips of paper and metal coins have a huge problem with forgery. Metal coins in particular can get very heavy very quickly.

Goats have this issue that they can get sick and die. They also need to be fed. Goats have a massive advantage that while heavy, they can move around on their own. Not easily fractionable though.

Salt is probably the best one in that list. Easily fractionable, not easy to forge. Can be used as seasoning and to dry things. It can get wet though.

dijitOP28d ago

You can disagree, that's fine.

But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed.

The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".

But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.

History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks.

A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.

surgical_fire28d ago

I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less physical money.

> A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

If you live in a place where you can be financially screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot more problems than if money is physical or not.

Also, you are disproportionately overstating the issues with digital money (I am still to see an example of a city being screwed because of Internet outage or programming issue). And you are also disproportionately shrugging away issues with physical money (it makes forgery and criminal activity much easier in many levels, to huge damage to society).

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surgical_fire28d ago

I respectfully disagree, but each with their own personal annoyances.

Strips of paper and metal coins have a huge problem with forgery. Metal coins in particular can get very heavy very quickly.

Goats have this issue that they can get sick and die. They also need to be fed. Goats have a massive advantage that while heavy, they can move around on their own. Not easily fractionable though.

Salt is probably the best one in that list. Easily fractionable, not easy to forge. Can be used as seasoning and to dry things. It can get wet though.

dijitOP28d ago

You can disagree, that's fine.

But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed.

The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".

But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.

History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks.

It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.

surgical_fire28d ago

I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less physical money.

If you live in a place where you can be financially screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot more problems than if money is physical or not.

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