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> 2 of the 3 dollars in your pocket have been created out of thin air in 2020.

Dollars in your pocket (not 70%, but 100% of them) have been created out of paper, after a swap of figures on a balance sheet (that you call “thin air”). The number of paper dollar didn't increase by ~70% this year, what did is an economic aggregate called M1 which is a conventional (since the sixties) way of counting certain things. It ISN'T some fundamental value of what-money-is®. Most of the dollar every American own (their bank account, and their savings) have never been part of M1, so this money wasn't affected either.

The monetary system is a complex thing, and the landscape is changing at a fast pace since 2008, which makes it even harder to graps. Unfortunately, most cryptofans didn't even try to understand it, and they keep parroting the almost 100 years-old Autrian critique of central-banking without any kind of cognitive effort: “It's obviously broken, so I'm not going to try understanding it”.

For people without prejudices, interested in understanding the subject, I strongly recommend Perry G Mehrling's lecture on the Economics of Money and banking on coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking



> M1 is the money supply that is composed of physical currency and coin, demand deposits, travelers' checks, other checkable deposits, and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m1.asp


> and they keep parroting the almost 100 years-old Autrian critique of central-banking without any kind of cognitive effort

Just naming something doesn’t invalidate it.


Naming something tells you what to look for in the academic literature (or even Wikipedia), where you will find in this case that the academic consensus has mostly moved on from the view named here


> the academic consensus

The academic consensus is a proxy for cultural elite; the condescending narcissists and effete.

Nothing reeks of moral superiority like brushing away opposition as "uneducated."


Someone is coming up with these theories, and it usually isn't Joe the Plumber.

Most propaganda & marketing campaigns are coming out of well educated folk. Look into the Heritage Foundation, for example...


Now I'm not sure if you're still talking about BTC or we switched to vaccines...


Economics is not a very difficult subject. Most people intuitively grasp supply and demand and other basics.

What mainstream economics has tried to convince us is that hard work is meaningless and infinite money can be printed. Scarcity is a myth. I don't need complex graphs to explain away why printing shitloads of money causes inflation and warps incentives. It's hilarious that Keynesians keep pushing the same garbage and being surprised when people respond by purchasing scarce assets like Bitcoin. What did you expect would happen?


There used to be massive economic crises all the time while people still were using your "intuitive" grasp of economics.

The truth is that inflation expectations were in the hole [0], and the Fed action restored inflation and price stability as per its mandate.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE


> Economics is not a very difficult subject

I can't believe its possible to be so wrong.

The history of humans might as well be "getting economics less wrong than last time"


Economics is not complicated. It is people who try to confuse us by wrapping mismanagement in the veneer of econometrics and "science" that try and make confusing what is actually relatively simple.


Both the US and Japan have ran enormous fiscal surpluses for decades with low inflation. How does your plain, simple intuition account for this gap between what you say must happen and what has happened?


Scarcity is a myth

I know of no serious economic school that espouses this.


The idea conveyed here is that scarcity being the foundation of value is a myth. No economist believes that just because something happens to be rare makes it inherently valuable. I dont think any real economist really believes that. I think it was a pop culture, snake oil salesman thing that brought it into the zeitgeist. Yet to this day, the myth still prevails and bitcoin is mostly based on that concept. Just because something is "limited" doesn't mean it already has value.


Scarcity is necessary but not sufficient for something to have value. There are plenty of rare things that are worthless. Various forms of toxic waste, for example, aren't particularly common and have negative value.


Keynes actually had a nice quip for things like Bitcoin:

> The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.




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