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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

Banking has existed for a few centuries, and state controlled money is something recent too, it used to be that multiple sources minted coins. And bitcoin which has existed for 10 years and is far more threatening to governments has not been extinguished.

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Bitcoin hasn't been extinguished because it's not a replacement for fiat. Transaction scaling still isn't there and no one in their right mind spends their bitcoin on coffee when it could 10x in a year and then drop 90% from there just to 10x again. It's become an investment class and governments are fine with that because people are investing their fiat into it and then pulling it back out to fiat later. There's no threat to their sovereign monetary policy yet.

Investment class is even more concerning for governments. The vast majority of USD is not used for buying coffee but stored in T bills

Nonsense. T-Bills have the lowest volatility because they're backed by the biggest guns on the planet. What is Bitcoin's volatility and how is that a threat again?

i m not saying that they feel threatened of course, but that investment class is even more of a reason to want to shut it down than it being used as a currency.

Gold coins can be minted at multiple places, or admitted foreign, because their value is gold by weight.

Mass fiat money are no more than 2 centuries old, in most places less than 60 years (see Bretton-Woods). They have to be tightly controled by state.

>>"Gold coins can be minted at multiple places, or admitted foreign, because their value is gold by weight."

If the value of the coin come from the gold in it, why mint them instead of using the gold directly?

(imperfect) stamp of quality and amount

Gold was used directly, too, as ingots, and as bullion (check out the gold rush of 1849).

But coins show the insignia of the state (and usually the monarch) that minted it; this is an important symbol, and also a guarantee of purity and weight, at least nominally.

Bills of exchange were privately issued by banks since the high middles ages in Europe and functioned a lot like dollars when convertability was still a thing. It's only relatively recently that they've been tightly controlled. they weren't in mass use like metal coinage was but they were essential to the re-establishment of long-range trade.

They always finally had to be exchanged to gold. Current dollars have no such peg, hence inflation, "quantitative easing" and other things only possible with fiat money. No king ever dreamed of monetary power like that of FRS.

Gold was not mostly used by the aristocracy. Coins for laypeople were things like silver, copper or bronze. People also bartered.

Even in Roman times currency were debased though. Financial technology has a pretty long history (Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible, was a pretty cool read on that).

> state controlled money is something recent too, it used to be that multiple sources minted coins

I don't think you're considering a long enough time scale, the minting of coins with the likeness of rulers and symbols of the power of the state is as old as the concept of currency and rulers.

There have been instances where companies printed their own script and new non-authoritarian nations might struggle for a bit early on with competing banks, but it's always resolved and power is vested in the central authority.

The role of currency from the point of view of the central authority is more than just economic - it's symbolic, it's propaganda, it's confidence in that government expressed by every citizen through the very act of accepting their currency as valuable.

Yeap what has changed is the scale. Never before have states exerted so strict monetary control in such vast areas. For medieval kings it was just impossible to prevent the use of other people's coins.

I’m not sure why anyone would really want to go back to a fractured system (inherently unstable, and very dominant in the early years in America) unless they live in an already unstable system.

Universality of your currency is kind of the best selling point isn’t it?

Is it? i dont know. My understanding is that dominant coins exist to subsidize dominant armies, which then protect the dominant coin in a virtuous/vicious cycle.

Also, barter worked very well since forever, in which every product is a different "coin", it just doesnt scale physically, while digital currencies do.

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