The USD is backed only by the “full faith and credit of the United States government”. Nothing tangible whatsoever. It’s fiat.
Isnt the difference that money is valued against something tangible. Like gold, oil or data. The strength of a countries currency is based on how much of these things it has.
Whereas crypto isn’t valued against anything other than thoughts and prayers. If people think it has value then it has value. Until people no longer think it does, at which point it tanks and you are no longer rich. It’s the same as those NFTs.
Sure you can make money in crypto, you can exchange it for traditional money if you play the game well. But that doesnt mean crypto has any inherent value.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
HereIAm@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Most currencies today are fiat currency. They only got value because they are the official currency of a nation and their government says so and people have the belief it has value. The US dollar used to be backed by gold but was stopped in the 70’s.
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 hours ago
data
tangiblein that case money itself is tangible and can be valued against itself. You are confusing exchange value and use value. Money has an exchange value, so does gold, oil or any other commodity. But unlike money they also have a use value.
sonalder@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
1 USD is worth 1 USD because you can pay 1 USD of taxes. It is backed by political promises, oil, weapons and war. This can’t end well.
Crypto means cryptography. Cryptocurrencies are a variety of things from stablecoin (digital token backed by fiat money often by a private company ), company shares, community projects, scams, scams, ponzi, scams, cool technical experiments and technically bad experiment. In the other hand there is Bitcoin (and Monero to some extent) that is owned by humanity, no foundation, no company, no state. It is backed by a proof of past energy brining the most innovative security system in the history of IT, not based on restricted access and opacity but by economical incentive to play fair with others in a big game theory peer-to-peer network.
Bitcoin is not the money of the internet. It’s the internet of money.
Andreas Antonopoulos
ogy@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
No. It used to be fixed against a physical asset but it hasn’t been for a long time now.