It just gets better and better.
- ES makes BTC fiat
- ES taps volcanoes to mine BTC
What next?
- ES uses natural wormholes to plot the future timeline and win Earth?
- ES makes BTC fiat
- ES taps volcanoes to mine BTC
What next?
- ES uses natural wormholes to plot the future timeline and win Earth?
As for "tapping volcanoes" it's a PR exercise - El Salvador is one of the countries in the world with largest geothermal generation capacity.
"Tapping volcanoes" here in effect simply means mining bitcoin with part of their geothermal generating capacity. But "tapping volcanoes" got this a whole lot more attention than it otherwise would.
Did I miss a memo?
Or is this a sort of Freduian slip wherein you said 'fiat' when you meant to say 'official'?
It seems to me that we've been conditioned to conflate the two.
> a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort
A fiat currency is one whose supply can be inflated by a command or act of will. The supply of Bitcoin cannot be inflated in this manner, so it's not a fiat currency. As properties, official and fiat are orthogonal. A currency can be one, or both, or neither.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp#:~:text=F....
> not backed by a physical commodity
Aren't these two ways of stating the same monetary property? The reason that fiat currencies can be created by fiat is they aren't backed by anything.
> Commodity-representative/redeemable currencies cam be created at will
No they certainly can not. Not without an actual supply of the commodity. At least not in the case of redeemables. Obviously some 'representative' currencies, like those that Zimbabwe has tried, have ended up turning into fiat.
> No they certainly can not. Not without an actual supply of the commodity.
Yes they can. (And there is plenty of historical example of that happening.) Heck, pre-state-monopoly banknotes were essentially a redeemable virtual currency over the currency in which they were denominated which often relied very heavily on this trait.
There is a risk associated with doing so, but that's also true of fiat currency, though the exact failure mode is different.
The alternatives would be that it is commodity money (which is not the case because you can't use a Bitcoin other than exchange it for something else) or representative money (which is not the case because Bitcoin isn't backed by anything else for which it can exchanged).
Up to this point, it's been a rather degenerate case of fiat money because the agreement that it has value has not been governmentally backed.
But now that's no longer the case. Congrats, Bitcoin, you now absolutely meet all the requirements of fiat money!
And are precious metals fiat by the standard you've laid out? Or are they commodities strictly on thin premise that you can use silver as a disinfectant, etc?
That's not what "fiat" means in this context. Fiat money is simply money that is asserted to be valuable. Control over issuance of money by those who assert the value of money is not an essential element of fiat money.
For example, the US dollar is adopted as the currency of the Republic of Palau, and yet the Republic of Palau has no control over the US dollar. Does that suggest to you that, in Palau, the US dollar is not the fiat currency?
>And are precious metals fiat by the standard you've laid out? Or are they commodities strictly on thin premise that you can use silver as a disinfectant, etc?
Precious metals are not money; they're commodities. No-one thinks they're money. The question "are precious metals fiat?" is meaningless.
No. This is absolutely not the historical or academic definition of this term.
From investopedia:
> Fiat money gives central banks greater control over the economy because they can control how much money is printed. [0]
To (in the passive voice, no less) that any money which "is asserted to be valuable" is fiat money makes every object ever valued by any human into fiat money.
Moreover, it manufactures consent because it takes away the crucial ability to talk about money which can be capriciously inflated vs. money which cannot. And being in the latter category is, according to Bitcoin proponents (heck, according to me), among Bitcoin's strengths.
"What about you guys floating $1 billion in “Volcano Bonds” (backed by future #BTC mining output) for El Salvador to pay off the IMF loan - so they can tell the IMF to beat it."
Not to mention the effect that trying to sell $1B-worth of Bitcoin could have on the market (even just a portion, Bitcoin is accepted nowhere for so they'd need real currency).