There is no physical money. It’s a mental construct, a controlled hallucination shared by almost the entire population of the globe. There’s no physical object which, by itself, can have an intrinsic, exchangeable value. Even if we can identify “precious” metals like gold, or coins, or notes, bonds or company shares as physical objects which are carrying a certain value, there’s no intrinsic value of them.
For many of the readers of this posts series (yes, I’m writing a posts series) this may seem like a delusional claim. “Of course there is physical money, I just paid my rent with it!” Oh well, what you did looked like and exchange of real, “physical” money for some service, but what happened was really something else.
It was a transfer of trust.
The posts you’re about to read will try to demystify the mainstream perception of money. Because, like it or not, money, as we know it, is just a myth.
Myth – noun
There are 4 possible meanings for the word “myth” in the Merriam Webster dictionary. The 2nd and the 3rd are the most relevant for our case. Here they are:
2 – a) a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone – especially one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society
2 – b) an unfounded or false notion
3 – a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence
We will certainly get back to these definitions at various points in this book, but for now let’s write down some key words:
- popular belief
- unfounded or false
- imaginary or unverifiable existence.
So, if money is not physical, what is it then?
Stick with me, we’ll all find out in the next post of the series.
Initially published on DragosRoua.com.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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@dragosroua,
We all need money to live a good life! But that doesn't mean we should believe it! Specially fiat, I don't even know what's the current market supply of fiat currency belongs to my country! But I know the extract figure in crypto!
Cheers~
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This is so true
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Intrinsic value is is an erroneous concept like ether in physics, and we need to get rid of it. Still, money do exist.
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I completely agree with the "ether" part.
To a certain degree, I also agree with "money do exist" and that degree is: "dreams do exist as well".
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True, one can scan persons dreaming brain and see dreaming activity on the computer screen :) When my dog dreams chasing a sheep its not a real chase, but at the same time dream is real and has a physical footprint.
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There’s no physical object which, by itself, can have an intrinsic, exchangeable value. - all of food.
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I disagree :)
What's food for me may not be food for you: if I'm vegetarian, then the beef you're eating has no intrinsic value for me.
It only has value if I can trust it to feed me - under my own terms of what food means.
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Exchangable and widely accepted as exchangable is difference. Everything is excvhangable under right conditions. Almost nothing is universaly exchangable.
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I'm not talking about exchangeable here, that's a different characteristic of money, I'm talking simply about value. My point is that value is a byproduct of trust, overwhelmingly.
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Well, you are in that sentance.
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Food, as an exchangeable value, has wildly varying value.
If the person is dying of hunger, that food is extremely valuable.
If the person just ate a seven course meal, you might not be able to give away the food.
And this is even more apparent on a macro scale.
Where, in modern times, mountains of wheat rot.
But, during the potatoe famine, there wasn't enough good potatoes at any price.
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Nothing in this plane is real, everything is a product of the notion and based on the collective. Money, although necessary, does not escape reality and now.
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Really an interesting topic because money is just any medium to settle debt , by who h all parties involved are satisfied
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The problem with money, paper or electronic, is they are not backed by anything. We choose to put our trust in something that continuously creates more debt than it is solvable to pay for.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
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I get it and look forward to reading your further posts. My favourite example of this trust was an archaic form of trust, that was a stick with lines cut into it, known as a 'tally stick'. This was a credit/favour system in medieval Europe.
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Money is undoubtedly that imaginary account in a bank that is necessary in a real world.
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True that. Let's go back to carrying cows around and exchanging them for other goods as needed. Now sure, not everyone will be able to fit a whole cow in their pocket. But with a crypto-cow, controlled by the Cowit corporation, you can be sure that you'll have all the cowpower you need non-stop, and its value always be pegged to that of one cow, and will never dive off a cliff like the crypto-lemming.
But in all seriousness, money physically exists. What you're referring to is the value of money being a construct of convenience agreed upon by society as a whole. People tend to have those kinds of constructs for a lot of things.
To quote a legend, in all caps, because that's how the quote goes.
"TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
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You're alone on a desert island, with a suitcase with one million dollars. Is that money in that context, or just a bunch of paper that you can use to make fire with?
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The same way a book is still a book if a person can't read, that is still money. It's worthless in that context but it still exists.
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If a tree falls in a forest but you can't hear the tree falling, nor seeing it, did it really fall?
Btw, I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing, there's a deeper meaning to all of these.
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In objective reality the tree does fall and it makes a sound. But that's going into quantum superposition stuff that may be a bit too deep for describing the construct of money.
I enjoy our dialogue. I really want to see your take on money in the next post :)
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I agree with with you ...
Anything that has "value" because people agree that it has value.
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it’s just molecules in the shape of an object. I get what you mean though about the trust thing.
Interesting enough, lately, I’ve been handing over loads of cash money to a contractor who’s overseeing the renovation of my house.
Or, in other words, I manifested cash from the digital numbers that I ‘see’ in my bank account and then handed it to someone else who - in turn - might hand it to someone else and so on. Now my numbers are down but do I really have less money? It depends of my perspective and look on money.
No matter what, the last weeks I was very much money minded and having to transfer from a bank account in one country to another and literally go to the bank to change it into a thing I thought I could touch and sometimes finding out the bank either didn’t have enough cash, being closed or the machine being down, made me very aware of this crazy shape shifting thing called money.
I could go on and on but let me conclude by saying that my look on money is changing a lot. I really have to rewrite my deelt ingraibed beliefs.
Interesting series :>)
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I tend to agree with you on this.
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No, money only has the value we give it. The human being needed a means of exchange to obtain any kind of benefit for his quality of life or needs, but as you have said it is only an object without any value.
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Great. I love this but actually it will be difficult for an ordinary or just permit me to use the word common man to understand this. Money is a transfer of trust. Yea I like that and I guess you are right about that line. I will be eager to check out your next series
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I dislike those dictionary definitions, because they are really aberrations of the word.
A myth is a story that has important meanings.
That people say... the myth is not true, as in to say that the myth is not valuable, is the aberration.
I agree that there is nothing with intrinsic value in itself.
There is nothing that can be used as a intrinsic store of wealth.
So, i like cryptos because it doesn't tie up any precious physical resources while being money.
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Partially true but others have raised a problem in your post, which I expand on in my article:
https://steemit.com/steem/@serovius/steem-s-opportunity-to-be-the-colossal-blockchain-of-the-next-generation-despite-setbacks
In fact money is directly equated with intrinsic value, if it's real money and backed by that value, such as the gold standard, or even in Steem's case the creative value of its content to the users. I won't go into detail here but it's in my article above.
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That's my point: there is no "intrinsic" value to money.
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You can transfer a couple of grands worth of trust to me if you like? ;-)
Don't forget, you can upvote peoples comments too!
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Resteemed ... upvoted.... thumps up.... keep the hardworking my friend
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I could not have said it better than you ... I enjoyed it.
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That's how fiat has been playing since it ever came into existence
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