a source familiar with the matter on Nostr: Money is a thing you give to someone as payment. It has to be a thing (and not an ...
Money is a thing you give to someone as payment.
It has to be a thing (and not an idea) otherwise you can't give it to someone (except metaphorically).
To make something better at being a thing you give to someone as payment, it can be more durable (so you don't have to give it right away), more uniform (so there's no debate about whether this unit of the thing is more or less valuable than something else) and more divisible (so if I get some number of units of the thing I don't have to spend them all at once).
"How fiat would fail without a way to inflate the money supply?"
You're confusing two different things. There is no 'money supply' of fiat. Fiat is currency. Fiat, like Bitcoin, is an attempt to settle accounts WITHOUT money. I can imagine multiple failure modes, but the most obvious is that a group of people starts using real money and other people decide they'd like to participate with the first group and receive real money rather than tokens.
OK - your turn. What is Bitcoin [the scarce valuable currency unit]? It can't be a computer record or computer code or cryptographic signature because any of those can be copied infinitely without losing the original (because they are patterns rather than actual entities and a pattern can be copied).
It has to be a thing (and not an idea) otherwise you can't give it to someone (except metaphorically).
To make something better at being a thing you give to someone as payment, it can be more durable (so you don't have to give it right away), more uniform (so there's no debate about whether this unit of the thing is more or less valuable than something else) and more divisible (so if I get some number of units of the thing I don't have to spend them all at once).
"How fiat would fail without a way to inflate the money supply?"
You're confusing two different things. There is no 'money supply' of fiat. Fiat is currency. Fiat, like Bitcoin, is an attempt to settle accounts WITHOUT money. I can imagine multiple failure modes, but the most obvious is that a group of people starts using real money and other people decide they'd like to participate with the first group and receive real money rather than tokens.
OK - your turn. What is Bitcoin [the scarce valuable currency unit]? It can't be a computer record or computer code or cryptographic signature because any of those can be copied infinitely without losing the original (because they are patterns rather than actual entities and a pattern can be copied).