If you’re reading this piece, you likely already know that El Salvador recently decreed Bitcoin legal tender. The dollar will similarly continue as

Bitcoin Won’t Replace The Dollar Because Its Creator(s) Don’t Know What’s Wrong With The Dollar

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2021-06-21 12:00:06

If you’re reading this piece, you likely already know that El Salvador recently decreed Bitcoin legal tender. The dollar will similarly continue as legal currency in the Central American nation.

Word has it that Bitcoin will enable much easier and safer remittances from Salvadorans working outside the country. The giant leap for the once obscure medium doubtlessly has some crypto-optimists with stars in their eyes about the future of decentralized money. El Salvador is the surely the beginning of increasingly common Bitcoin circulation.

Bitcoin’s not about to replace the dollar, or any other broadly circulated money form. While there’s much to dislike about the dollar, Bitcoin’s creator(s) don’t know why the greenback is disliked.

To the reflexively libertarian in our midst who aren’t quite sure why they’re libertarian, Bitcoin is logically superior because it’s not “government money.” Fair enough, at first glance. Except that the lack of trust in the dollar is not because it’s government money; rather more than a few disdain the greenback because it lacks stability as a measure. More than that, they hate when the dollar is devalued. Stop and think about it.

Money isn’t wealth. Money is an agreement about value that facilitates the movement of wealth. I’ll pay you $10 for your HoneyCrisp apples, and you’ll sell them to me because you eye the butcher’s ribeye longingly. Money well predates government simply because money is as old as trade is. For as long as producers have been producing, they’ve used a variety of money forms (agreements about value) to exchange their surplus with others eager “to get” for their own surplus.