Читать книгу Bitcoin For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 21

Money, then, is all about belief. The physical representations of money that we grow up with make perfect sense to us. Other representations feel like “play money.”

Marco Polo was stunned to discover, on his journey to China, that the Great Khan used alchemy — magic, in effect — to (as one chapter title in Polo’s book puts it) “Causeth the Bark of Trees, Made Into Something Like Paper, to Pass for Money All Over his Country.” That’s right, surely only magic could turn paper into money!

In fact, even most of your own fiat currency is made of nothing more than an idea. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, explains that money is merely an idea, a human concept, not an actual thing you can see or touch.

In fact, he says, “the total value of money worldwide is $60 trillion dollars, of which a mere $6 trillion is in cash or coins 90 percent of all money is nothing more than entries in a computer server. Money is a faith-based object, whose value is derived by the shared narrative about its worth.”

You can see this for yourself. If you do an Internet search for “money supply” and dig around a little, you’ll find different measures of money supply: M0, M1, M2, and so on. M0 is cash — coins and bills. M1 also includes deposits in checking accounts. M2 includes all that, but also includes savings accounts, mutual funds, and so on. Dig around a little more, and you’ll find that what you think of as money — the coins and bills — actually represents only around 10 percent of all the money in circulation!

So, here’s a quick question for you. What’s the difference between Bitcoin and U.S. dollars, or pounds sterling, or euros? With those fiat currencies, 90 percent of the money is “nothing more than entries in a computer server.” With Bitcoin, it’s 100 percent!

There are other differences, of course (some of which we cover in Chapter 2). But our goal here is to show you that Bitcoin and fiat currencies share an important characteristic: They all rely on belief to function. As long as people believe in any currency, the currency holds value.

That’s not to say any particular currency — including Bitcoin — will hold peoples’ beliefs forever. What we are trying to do here is explain how something as ephemeral as Bitcoin can be valuable.