I like to go on crusades against economically illiterate and monetary ignorant Bitcoiners... it's my schpiel, and it SORT OF comes from a good place: I want you guys to be better Bitcoiners, better understand the asset and money you love, and better able to critique the incumbent system we're out here trying to replace.
The other day I ranted at the sticker price increase at a fancy Stockholm restaurant across time (#1264166). Today we're taking apart another favorite trope:
MONEY ISN'T A FIXED MEASURING ROD, YOU GUYS!
Here's my dude Pete Earle at AIER hammering that standard-sized nail into the many zombie coffins out there:
If a dollar were constant, like an inch or an hour, trade would collapse. A core part of currency’s purpose is to contract and expand, signaling scarcity and abundance.
We reside in a world increasingly shaped by data, quantification, and metrics. And because of that, it’s tempting to regard one of the goods we interact with repeatedly — money — as if it were another unit of measurement, similar to inches for length, seconds for time, or pounds for weight. But money is not, and has never been, a measure of economic value in the same way that other units are fixed and universal. One dollar is not equivalent to one inch. It does not represent a constant or a standard across time, space, or circumstance.
The confusion stems from, I believe, that looking at the world in a snapshot picture, the money is the measuring stick we use to compare between what we have (wealth, asset, incomes) and what we're trading for (investments, expenses). What holds in snapshot doesn't hold over time or through real changes. The real world is in constant flux; the money isn't the only thing blasting prices and economic numbers around.
Unlike units of measurement, which are defined by stable physical or logical properties, money’s “unit” — the dollar, euro, yen — is anchored not in any immutable constant, but in a fragile consensus mediated by governments, central banks, markets, and individuals.
Some comments, e.g. by @CliffBadger, fell prey to exactly this real-vs-nominal confusion (#737272), missing the real forest for the monetary trees.
A true measurement unit
must be universally consistent, reproducible, and immune to the vagaries of time and politics. An inch in Florida is an inch in Alaska. A minute on a sundial is conceptually the same as a minute on a smartphone. A kilogram in 1965 and 2025 weigh the same in practice,
Money isn't like that:
Importantly, we don’t want money to be a fixed unit in the way a meter or kilogram is. We want money to fluctuate — to stretch and compress — because it is through those changes that money performs one of its most vital functions: signaling economic conditions. Transmitting relative price changes, in response to underlying conditions of supply and demand, is among money’s key purposes. It reflects the scarcity or abundance of resources, the urgency of needs, the shifting preferences of consumers, and the risks perceived among lenders and investors.
"A perfectly stable dollar, sometimes referred to as a fixed dollar, would be a dead dollar"
The interaction between money and prices is best understood as a series of exchange ratios — dynamic relationships reflecting how much of one good or service is given up to obtain another, using money as the intermediary.
There you go, noisy Bitcoiners. Read those paragraphs again, please... and change your goddamn mind.
Tl;dr: Y'alls suck at thinking about money, even though that's what you do all day long! Please be better.
...then Pete goes a little bit off course:
A dollar is not simply a “thing” but a tacit agreement — one that is only meaningful if others accept it and treat it as valuable. This contrasts sharply with units like the second or the kilogram, which require no trust to function as standards.
So far, so good... BUT BITCOIN IS. Fair enough, it only has "value" by tacit agreement whenever someone else accept a transfer and recreation of a UTXO in exchange for goods and services (or other moneys), but it does exist out there in the ether(!), a mathematical combination somewhere on an elliptic curve.