You're walking down the street. You look down to see a crisp $100 bill. Really imagine the sight of 100 dollars free right in front of you. Your brain releases endorphins and for an instant, you feel like a lottery winner. Why did your brain create such an emotional response? This isn't an instinctive necessity, like food or sex; it's just paper.
Money produces an emotional response. We all know this. I guess I didn't realize it until I moved to Europe. I noticed that I was unable to recognize euros with the same reverence I had for dollars. If I saw 100EUR on the ground, I just saw colorful paper. There was no emotional response, even though I knew consciously that 100EUR was worth more than $100. I had to be careful with my spending because, psychologically, I didn't feel any loss or guilt when I traded the paper in for valued goods and services. Finally, after about two or three months of using the paper as a means of exchange, my psyche was conditioned into seeing euros as money. I started to feel giddy at the sight of euros on the ground.
Money is a social construct. Jung would say it's an archetype and Dawkins would call it a meme. It's the collective effect of a society simultaneously experiencing the same psychological conditioning that I described above. I will call this "Keith's Giddiness Test of Money": if it doesn't make you giddy, it's not money (to you). Imagine walking in the woods and coming across a cache of copper. Now imagine finding the same in gold. Yee-haw! Gold!
People have asked why gold is money for a long time. I have heard and even given many answers to this question: divisibility, durability, fungibility, scarcity etc. All these answers are wrong because they answer a different question: "What makes gold good money?" The question was "Why is gold money?" The answer to that is singular: "It's because we all believe it."
Gold has been money for thousands of years and our collective subconscious has been conditioned for as long into believing it. This is obviously a positive feedback loop: "We believe gold is money because we believe gold is money." So when you ask a merchant, "Can I pay in gold?" they might say "Yes." Many people actually still remember a time when gold was the only form of hard money. That was before 1971 when the U.S. government threw the feedback loop off gold and onto their fiat currency, successfully convincing the entire world that unbacked U.S. treasury notes were money, more money than gold.
Now it seems obvious that the answers to "Why is gold money?" were wrong. Gold isn't even money anymore; dollars are. Dollars don't have the same sound properties of money that gold does, but we believe dollars are money because we believe dollars are money. This belief doesn't happen in the "thinking part of the brain". Remember how I couldn't convince my subconscious that 100 euros was money, though I knew it consciously? Considering how reptilian our brains are in regard to money, it's almost a miracle that something as sound as gold ever became the dominant global currency. As a historical fantasy, I attribute this to a minority of thoughtful people who convinced everyone else that gold was #1.
Today, we can consider some cryptocurrencies alongside gold as a sound form of money. Take a look at this table. Nine of the rows are properties of good money, and one of the rows, "Established history", regards the single thing that actually makes it money.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/a4mhab/comparison_table_gold_x_cash_x_credit_cardpaypal/
In this chart, monero is obviously the best money, except for the single thing that actually makes it money, which is essentially, popularity.
With all this in mind, there are only two cryptocurrencies that make me giddy: bitcoin, for its popularity, and monero, for its merit. But this is not to say that popularity is meritless; as I said before, it is the only essential property of money. So bitcoin and monero are two monies to me; all other cryptocurrencies are investments, ranging from good investment to outright scam, and leaning heavily towards the latter.
^ 2023/11
< 09/10 11/11