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I mean, transport rather than translate; and the future hasn't happened yet, so it's speculative and entrepreneurial rather than "scientific"/trying-to-be-accurate.

If we can't compare the purchasing power of a dollar today with a dollar from 1950, how does money work at all?

This strikes me as a temporal issue, Misesian Regression theorem style... As in, by holding money I continually (say every day) reassess my decision to do so with knowledge of the market prices out there and goods on offer. I never have to make a 75-year comparison across economic eras. That should make a difference eh?

38 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 12h

But this is curious isn't it? Translate versus transport. The point of money (at least a little) is to transport value.

Now, I have a quarter that was minted in 1936. If I take it to the store, I can't hardly buy what I could have bought with it in 1936. Bad transport of value. We want Bitcoin to fix this.

As we said in another thread: I got paid in Bitcoin last year. Bitcoin went down. Now I've got less purchasing power. That's frustrating, maybe even it makes Bitcoin bad money. Some kind of fixing.

Ideally, my purchasing power would be preserved. If it is, my sats today would be able to purchase as much as when I got 'em. I thought this is some of what we mean when we say something is a good money--it holds its purchasing power across time. If it does, wouldn't that tell us about the relative prices of other things? Transporting value is how you can translate it.

I've been spending way too much time with the regression theorem -- as you will see Monday or Tuesday.

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I got paid in Bitcoin last year. Bitcoin went down. Now I've got less purchasing power. That's frustrating, maybe even it makes Bitcoin bad money. Some kind of fixing. Ideally, my purchasing power would be preserved

Exactly that. Preserved PP is like 90% of the argument for why bitcoin is better money, and why we ought to save in it rather than some other broken asset.
...and then it doesn't do that, indicating how poorly it functions — no matter how beautifully we may paint its world-domination future. Shit is dead, eh

Re: prices telling us. I suppose you're right here, because if we take away monetary effects on nominal prices all that remain is the real changes. So yeah. That's at least partly how bitcoin, and even more so gold, can make economies function better.

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