I'd prefer my money be made of ...
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Missing option - cotton and linen fiber? (Score:3, Informative)
The American dollar isn't truly paper. It's more of a cloth if I recall correctly.
Re:Missing option - cotton and linen fiber? (Score:4, Informative)
Almost ALL "paper" money is made from some kind of cotton. Not only the US dollar.
So "paper" is an invalid option in this poll.
You can make paper out of cotton, or any source of fiber, really. I thought what distinguishes paper from cloth was that cloth is woven, whereas paper is just fibers collected on a screen in random fashion.
Plastic all the way... (Score:3, Informative)
I chose plastic because our new bills are made of a plastic polymer, and I've found it's far superior to the old paper notes. I think most countries have found this as well.
Re:Paper FTW (Score:4, Informative)
Strippers are just fine with plastic banknotes in Australia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and other countries that have switched over. They're easier to clean than the paper ones, too.
Re:Missing option - cotton and linen fiber? (Score:5, Informative)
But, not quite.
The original paper was papyrus.
no one would waste cotton for making paper.
You're confusing the current rag process with historic paper making.
paper made 200 years ago does not yellow and fade. Modern manufacturing uses an acid process. When wood pulp was first used to make paper this was not how it was done. Wood pulp paper made without acid lasts.
perhaps you're confusing parchment with paper.
Parchment is animal skin, shaved thin.
It's what the magna carta is written on.
Re:Trust (Score:4, Informative)
Precious metals, on the other hand, do not require trust in other human beings (at least when held directly)
Yes they do. Here's why. You have a cow. I buy it from you with a gold coin. You have to trust that the fire I just started in my cabin isn't a smoke signal to bandits, letting them know that I have the cow and a sucker is coming down the road with a gold coin. Now me and my buddies have a cow and a gold coin. You have nothing. You mistakenly trusted that I was an honest dealer, and then when you rode into town you mistakenly believed that the sheriff wasn't in on the whole deal. We're all having whiskey at the bar, laughing it up now. Bar tender! Another round for the poor sod-buster who believed that gold is any more trustworthy than the society that uses it.
Re:Virtual Commodity (Score:4, Informative)
If you took all the dollars and pounds and euros, etc. in bank accounts and compared them to all the dollars and pounds and euros as notes and coins, you'd find there was a huge amount more money in the accounts than in the cash.
Most money exists as records in a computer rather than as physical currency.
Misquoting the Bible, are we? (Score:2, Informative)
No matter the translation, the Bible does not say that "money is the root of evil". They all say, one way or the other, "the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil". Look it up.
Bah.
Re:Virtual Commodity (Score:2, Informative)
Gold was a token. And gold was perfect for this purpose:
- it's scarce (not easy to destabilise the economy by injecting lots of currency)
- it's easily molded (yeah, not everyone had the tools to melt tungsten back in the day)
- it's resistant chemically (unaffected by air, moisture and most corrosive reagents - so you can store it for ages)
Due to this it was commonly used as money. And as it was commonly used as money for AGES people somehow got it into their heads that gold is valuable.
Trust (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone remember that money was invented in Lydia, what is now Turkey, to lubricate the barter of things you actually worked for? It's an abstraction of direct means of sustenance, and it's supposed to represent valuable resources and work.
Entire empires - the Inca, for example - have never used this abstraction. The Inca had an even allotment of labor time in exchange for an even share out of the empire's storehouses. They left us amazing agricultural insights, cities of amazing stonework, and fabulous textiles. Anyone who thinks that stock market derivatives are wealth or that the only alternatives to capitalism are poverty or Joe Stalin can chew on that.
Money as we know it has gotten to be a more devilish abstraction than anything us programming nerds would ever allow. It's gotten to be a tool to make sure that CEOs, shareholders, and bankers have all the clout, and hence, nearly all the take. They get paid in digital money for throwing around digital money to their advantage so much that, if wealth were perfectly equal in America, we'd all make $100,000, have a home paid for, have a college education paid for, or some other configuration of lifestyle. I'm not saying that perfect equality is the way to go, but I'm saying that the way clout has overridden value of labor shows that money is now deeply broken.
One of the smartest things anybody said to me was,
"Trust is the only real currency."