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If we imagine a world where airline miles had emerged as the dominant form of money, which category would they be.
I think so too but that undermines the critique of fiat that its value is arbitrary.
Rather than conclude that bitcoin isn’t fiat, we also have the option of concluding that fiat isn’t inherently a problem.
Bitcoin code is not law, but subject to consensus. ERC-20 tokens are definitely fiat.
I wonder if Bob has heard this rational or understands the difference. It's actually pretty common for pro-bitcoin people to not understand consensus.
He talks a lot about blockchain but I haven't heard him explain proof of work or other ways bitcoin is different from the rest of crypto.
It was hard to grasp for me until the whole segwit2x mess. Then I understood that hardforks are a feature, not a bug. It is good that a minority can split off and have their fork. We may see that happen once more in September this year.
I've spent a lot of time talking to people that tried to solve "the hardfork bug" over the years. I think that the best example must have been Terra, which was running a consensus protocol that made chain splits "impossible". The result was corruption: 14 "miners" decided the faith of that chain in a closed meeting. It died. All of it. But with Bitcoin we can always choose to not consent to a change (or not consent with the status quo) and that is actually a very interesting feature. Imagine that we'd still be having fights about block size.
Agreed. I think it's a new form of money.
So based on how I read Mises, it's not fiat, because unlike in something rigid, like ERC-20, Bitcoin code is not law, but subject to consensus. ERC-20 tokens are definitely fiat.
It's also not commodity money as Mises describes it either, and of course it's not credit money. I agree with these.
So, based on this, I'd say it's
none of the above. I think the reason for his classification towards fiat is because he's artificially limiting his options based on a 1908 paper.