Some people claim that crypto-currencies are sound money. However, this is simply not true.
For something to be money, it has to be a resource, and crypto is not a resource. It is a set of hard to calculate numbers, and numbers are not resources.
The reason money has to be a resource is that any currency is a claim on a resource. Unlike money, currency is simply a claim and not the resource itself. If unbacked, the claim is just that, a general claim conjured into existence from nothing. However, if a currency is backed by a resource, it is no longer a general claim, but a claim to something specific. That specific something, backing up the claim, is money.
Money is in other words the resource itself, while currency is the claim to the resource in question.
A currency backed by gold is a claim on gold. Such a currency has an infrastructure associated with it in which holders of said currency can get their money. They can hand in their currency and get gold in return.
Holders of unbacked currencies do not have such an infrastructure. They have no guaranteed way to get a specific amount of a specific resource. Instead, they must at all times convince someone else that their general claim will still be good tomorrow. Such a system is entirely faith based. It only works as long as people believe that the general claim will still be good tomorrow. However, there's no guarantee anywhere that it will in fact be so.
For money to be sound, there is an additional requirement that the resource in question must be both limited and stable, and this is where the confusion with crypto comes into play. Since a given crypto-currency is both limited and stable, the argument is that it must be sound.
But there is no limit to how many different crypto-currencies can be created, so while there might be something sound about a specific crypto-currency, there is nothing sound about crypto-currencies as a whole.
Crypto is therefore neither money nor sound. It is unbacked currency, and wholly unsound to boot.
In contrast, both gold and silver are money. They are also sound since their amounts are both limited and stable. However, of the two, gold is by far the more sound. The reason for this is that silver is easier to mine, and also used in industry.
The amount of silver available at any given time varies much more than the amount of gold. That makes gold the soundest of the two.
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