I'm sick of all these libertarian, "It's better money" idiots. Money is horrible. It's a bad measure of value, it's debt based and designed to keep things in a closed controllable system. We don't need better money. We need an end to resource scarcity so we no longer need money at all.
I am a proponent of the credit-theory of money, as opposed to debt-theory which we espouse in our current system hence the perpetual indebtedness of every government ruled by central banks. I'd agree that both bitcoin and the dollar are very poor if not completely arbitrary measures of value, which are based primarily on confidence (see confidence trick). Money was first created to be a measure of real resources but somewhere that was lost along the way as banks grew bigger and bigger.
These cyclical "bubbles" (frauds) and stock market crashes are simply crises of information and not of real resources and would be easily eliminated if we moved to a legitimate system which actually measured real resources objectively.
>They think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around, it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere… and it doesn’t. Money is something we have to invent, like inches.
>So, you remember the Great Depression when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before. But it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today, no inches.”
>“What do you mean no inches?”
>“Just inches! We don’t mean that… we’ve got inches of lumber, yes, we’ve got inches of metal, we’ve even got tape measures, but there’s a slump in inches as such.”
>And people are that crazy!
-Alan Watts
Of course ending resource scarcity would be nice, but chances are there would still be scarcity, since some resources would still be difficult to copy and thus scarce.
Money is not a measure of value, it is used as a store of value and a way of transmitting value, but it has no intrinsic value.
This seems self contradictory. How can a piece of paper be used to "store value" but have no intrinsic value at the same time? That would mean it is a measure of value.
You are not measuring anything, just finding an equivalence. There is nothing "rulerlike" about money.
The idea of measurement as my comment's parent used it, is at best a very sloppy way of thinking of what is going on. This may make sense in a colloquial sense, but it does not reveal anything about the mechanism that gives money value.
To give you an example, notes from a failed currency are worth only whatever the paper is worth, and do not (like silver coins) have alternate purpose as dental fillings which gives them intrinsic value.
>There is nothing "rulerlike" about money.
rulers have standard unit sizes which can be counted