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Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say. Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO. NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received

CodingJeebus 3mo ago
> There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system. The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with? Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.
Ygg2 3mo ago
> but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI. Wonder how long the second scam will last.
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  AI can’t exactly be turned into money the way crypto shenanigans can. You can sell inference, but it has to actually be real.
  - saalweachter 3mo ago
    You can sell scams -- LLMs may be dubious at many tasks, but they're probably good enough to use to write personalized email or texts convincing random people to send you money.
tootie 3mo ago
Honestly as much as people complain the US Federal Reserve really just proved their enormous value and thoroughly vindicated fiat currency. The financial crisis of 2007-8 should have been a new Depression and it wasn't. Instead we've seen uninterrupted growth for close to 20 years. Markets have really internalized that the US economy is indestructible and the Fed will always protect us from disaster. Will it last forever? Of course not. But like Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead".
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  Euros, dollars, pounds, francs, and yen are all more stable and easier to use than cryptocurrencies. It gets even easier once you toss in Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, various debit card and regional networks, and ubiquitous banking services. Checks and online ACH payments are free or nearly free. Payment card platforms are cheap in consideration the value you get for them. Meanwhile actually spending crypto is quite expensive - worse than Visa’s transaction fees, and far less consumer and merchant protections.
  - glitchc 3mo ago
    The key difference is that they all require identity to use and can be traced back to a person.
    - atomic_cowprod 3mo ago
      That is by design and is a good thing to everyone except cartels and communist governments.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        What about people wanting to buy abortion pills?
        trollbridge 3mo ago
        Cash, at a pharmacy. Crypto doesn’t make that any better. Neither does online ordering. Online orders have to have a degree of KYC.
nradov 3mo ago
Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories. If you interact with the US financial system in any significant way then you're likely to end up owing some income taxes, and those can only be paid in US dollars. If you don't pay then eventually law enforcement officers will seize your assets (real estate, cattle, gold, cryptocurrency, whatever) by force and auction them off to settle your tax debt. And if you try to stop them then they'll shoot you. Overall this is a good and stable system. The cryptocurrency clowns never seem to address the sovereign taxation issue.
- JyB 3mo ago
  While that is true, the overarching point is that it fundamentally still is, just a story. You're just describing real world consequences, precisely because humans/societies believe in that story and enforce it.
  - Stefan-H 3mo ago
    By that logic, most everything other than a club to the head is "just stories". Hume points out in a Treatise on Human Nature that most of how we interact with the world is through a coherent hallucination provided by sense organs that tell very narrow stories, but when stitched together form a cohesive whole. You're almost doing the equivalent of saying that gravity is "just a theory".
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    Society is a story, not a chemical reaction. People like the story of money because the stories that had gold coins or barter sucked a lot worse.
- altruios 3mo ago
  > Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories ... Then how do we, as a society, determine how much a dollar is worth?! We do use force to enforce the stories we tell about fiat. But 'believe this story about how much a dollar will buy you and how much you owe, or else we will send thugs to your house' isn't disproving the point at all.
louprado 3mo ago
"but as long as we all believe it has value, it does". Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots. I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.
- rob74 3mo ago
  Well no, an airplane is a tangible thing that can fly, and as long as the safety culture of the people responsible for flying airplanes is strong enough, so crashes are very rare, people will fly with it. Currency OTOH is basically a (forgery-proof) piece of paper with a number written on it, or even just a number in a database on some (hopefully well-protected) server. So it can only be used to buy stuff as long as we all agree that it's worth something. Of course, it helps if a government and/or a central bank is behind it, but even without a functioning government, a currency can limp on for decades, such as in Somalia, where the last banknotes were printed in 1991, but people still used them as the lowest "rung" of a three-tier system consisting of the Somali shilling, the US dollar and mobile phone payments, until recently when businesses sort of agreed to not accept them anymore (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somalis-hit-hardest-currency-shillings-mobile-money https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somali...).
- thephyber 3mo ago
  No, an airplane is a physical thing we interact with which has intrinsic value, physical transportation. This is a perfect example of what money is not. Money is not the token (the coin or paper bill), but the component of the ledger the token represents. Sometimes there is no physical token, only an entry in a ledger (eg. digital transfers after fractional reserve banking). The intrinsic value of the metals in the dime are (usually) worth less than the face value of the denomination, hence the discussion that the _story_ is more important than the physical _token_. The author of Sapiens is a very famous speaker on many topics HNers like. He’s worth a listen.

CodingJeebus 3mo ago

> There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system. The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with? Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.

Ygg2 3mo ago

> but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI. Wonder how long the second scam will last.

trollbridge 3mo ago
AI can’t exactly be turned into money the way crypto shenanigans can. You can sell inference, but it has to actually be real.
- saalweachter 3mo ago
  You can sell scams -- LLMs may be dubious at many tasks, but they're probably good enough to use to write personalized email or texts convincing random people to send you money.

tootie 3mo ago

Honestly as much as people complain the US Federal Reserve really just proved their enormous value and thoroughly vindicated fiat currency. The financial crisis of 2007-8 should have been a new Depression and it wasn't. Instead we've seen uninterrupted growth for close to 20 years. Markets have really internalized that the US economy is indestructible and the Fed will always protect us from disaster. Will it last forever? Of course not. But like Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead".

trollbridge 3mo ago
Euros, dollars, pounds, francs, and yen are all more stable and easier to use than cryptocurrencies. It gets even easier once you toss in Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, various debit card and regional networks, and ubiquitous banking services. Checks and online ACH payments are free or nearly free. Payment card platforms are cheap in consideration the value you get for them. Meanwhile actually spending crypto is quite expensive - worse than Visa’s transaction fees, and far less consumer and merchant protections.
- glitchc 3mo ago
  The key difference is that they all require identity to use and can be traced back to a person.
  - atomic_cowprod 3mo ago
    That is by design and is a good thing to everyone except cartels and communist governments.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      What about people wanting to buy abortion pills?
      - trollbridge 3mo ago
        Cash, at a pharmacy. Crypto doesn’t make that any better. Neither does online ordering. Online orders have to have a degree of KYC.

nradov 3mo ago

Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories. If you interact with the US financial system in any significant way then you're likely to end up owing some income taxes, and those can only be paid in US dollars. If you don't pay then eventually law enforcement officers will seize your assets (real estate, cattle, gold, cryptocurrency, whatever) by force and auction them off to settle your tax debt. And if you try to stop them then they'll shoot you. Overall this is a good and stable system. The cryptocurrency clowns never seem to address the sovereign taxation issue.

JyB 3mo ago
While that is true, the overarching point is that it fundamentally still is, just a story. You're just describing real world consequences, precisely because humans/societies believe in that story and enforce it.
- Stefan-H 3mo ago
  By that logic, most everything other than a club to the head is "just stories". Hume points out in a Treatise on Human Nature that most of how we interact with the world is through a coherent hallucination provided by sense organs that tell very narrow stories, but when stitched together form a cohesive whole. You're almost doing the equivalent of saying that gravity is "just a theory".
- pixl97 3mo ago
  Society is a story, not a chemical reaction. People like the story of money because the stories that had gold coins or barter sucked a lot worse.
altruios 3mo ago
> Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories ... Then how do we, as a society, determine how much a dollar is worth?! We do use force to enforce the stories we tell about fiat. But 'believe this story about how much a dollar will buy you and how much you owe, or else we will send thugs to your house' isn't disproving the point at all.

louprado 3mo ago

"but as long as we all believe it has value, it does". Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots. I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.

rob74 3mo ago
Well no, an airplane is a tangible thing that can fly, and as long as the safety culture of the people responsible for flying airplanes is strong enough, so crashes are very rare, people will fly with it. Currency OTOH is basically a (forgery-proof) piece of paper with a number written on it, or even just a number in a database on some (hopefully well-protected) server. So it can only be used to buy stuff as long as we all agree that it's worth something. Of course, it helps if a government and/or a central bank is behind it, but even without a functioning government, a currency can limp on for decades, such as in Somalia, where the last banknotes were printed in 1991, but people still used them as the lowest "rung" of a three-tier system consisting of the Somali shilling, the US dollar and mobile phone payments, until recently when businesses sort of agreed to not accept them anymore (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somalis-hit-hardest-currency-shillings-mobile-money https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somali...).
thephyber 3mo ago
No, an airplane is a physical thing we interact with which has intrinsic value, physical transportation. This is a perfect example of what money is not. Money is not the token (the coin or paper bill), but the component of the ledger the token represents. Sometimes there is no physical token, only an entry in a ledger (eg. digital transfers after fractional reserve banking). The intrinsic value of the metals in the dime are (usually) worth less than the face value of the denomination, hence the discussion that the _story_ is more important than the physical _token_. The author of Sapiens is a very famous speaker on many topics HNers like. He’s worth a listen.