It's not just a preference. Taxation is what gives the currency value.
The government can create and destroy dollars. It spends dollars into existence, and it taxes them into nothingness.
But if it receives BTC, it can't destroy the BTC. Same with any foreign currency.
It needs to be able to destroy the tax money after you pay it.
I think the key thing here is the myth that money was invented to optimize an unwieldy barter economy. Money isn't actually a tool for ad hoc person-to-person trade, but for trade among members of a community.
And in that setting, it's less about the mechanics of measuring the value of individual items and more about balancing the number of favors owed to/from each member of the community. The magnitude of those favors definitely scale according to the material value of the items flowing through the favors -- but it's a secondary, not primary, concern.
It's true that money can be anything we decide to agree upon, but it's not as a stand-in for valuable goods. It's as a stand-in for "credit against my debt of favors owed".
Your country could accept cryptocurrency for your taxes, if just chooses not to.
Not really. It would have to sell the crypto for its sovereign currency. The whole point of issuing+taxing currency is to get citizens to do favors for the government.
If you're paying citizens for favors in USD, but accepting BTC to clear out "favors owed", nobody has any incentive to chase USD, because any amount of BTC usage is going to dilute the value of their USD.
Unless you keep the amount of BTC you accept tied to its current market value in USD. But that's not really "accepting" crypto, that's just selling it on their behalf as a convenience.
But people won't stop accepting the US dollar, because they need it in order to pay their taxes. And even if they absolutely refused to accept it, it would still be worth something. Because if you had it, it could still be used to avoid punishment for failing to pay taxes.
Taxes are what give money value. Because being in prison is tangible.
Not really. Currencies are genuinely valuable, in that they resolve non-discretionary liabilities.
You could say that those liabilities are made-up too, as well as the laws that produced them, or the authority of the lawmakers that penned the laws, or that words can be derived from the scribbles that pen produces, or the notion of words themselves...
But ultimately, you'll confront the fact that the IRS demands payment in USD or they'll throw you in prison.
Y... yeah? Pretty much, yeah.
Money, therefore, arose out of liability: farmers valued coins because they had a nondiscretionary liability that could only be settled with those coins (their taxes). People who weren't farmers would also accept coins, because they knew that the farmers needed them, and since they needed to trade with farmers, anything the farmers would accept was therefore valuable to all.
Over and over in history, we see examples of money emerging through the need to settle a nondiscretionary liability.
The idea that money comes from liabilities was popularized by Warren Mosler, the progenitor of Modern Monetary Theory. In Mosler's lectures, he illustrates the point by asking, "Who will stay after the lecture to stack chairs and mop the floor, in exchange for one of my business-cards?" When no one raises their hand, he adds, "What if I told you that there was an armed guard at the door and if you don't give him a business-card, he won't let you leave?" Of course, every hand shoots up.
Mosler's door-tax turns his cards into money.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/
“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across, otherwise they will fight like a caged and cornered tiger.”
So many great opportunities for light rail around here, especially because of the geographical constraints. If there were big subsidies for doing it, I think the city would get interested.
In these sexual relationships, availability and consent will always be taken for granted, something that’s never taken for granted in a sexual relationship with another human being.
People could get used to interacting in a way in which the other person isn’t taken into account as much, meaning that sexual partners could be instrumentalized for the purpose of having sex. That is to say the ‘human-humanoid’ interaction could be transferred to the relationship between two human beings.
…
Unfortunately, however, these advances aren’t being accompanied by deep reflections about the consequences that sex with robots can have.
Character’s blue fur (bottom)
RFK’s brainworm says cancer is good for you, now get back to your ADHD camp.