Eye opener- Bitcoin

You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real

“Bitcoin is an illusion, a mass hallucination, so one hears. It’s just numbers in cyberspace, a mirage, insubstantial as a soap bubble. Bitcoin is not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who buy it and of the greater fools who buy it from these lesser fools. And you know? Fair enough. All this is true.

What may be less easy to grasp is that U.S. dollars are likewise an illusion. They too consist mainly of numbers out there in cyberspace. Sometimes they’re stored in paper or coins, but while the paper and coins are material, the dollars they represent are not. U.S. dollars are not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who accept it as payment and of other fools who agree in turn to accept it as payment from them. The main difference is that, for the moment at least, the illusion, in the case of dollars, is more widely and more fiercely believed.”

“The fight for stability in any currency is always in the process of being lost, because wherever there is a chance to game or forge a transaction, human nature is such that some will try to cheat. Even the limited and precarious stability we have in developed countries requires vigilance and work on the part of countless principled people, and there’s never certainty. The struggle to preserve the illusion that money is real is never over, and it never can be.”

• Maria Bustillos