Greetings

I’m fairly new to crypto currency but I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading all I can find about it. Given the problems and the designed to fail nature of fiat currency I think crypto may have a bright future. Ive checked out most of the communities around the various coins but this one seems the most progressive and welcoming.

chrisj

Welcome and thanks for your kind words and feedback.

I would say that the most important feature of money is that everyone agrees that it has value at all times. If a currency does not pass this simple test then it fails to be money in my opinion.

Money is a ledger, it is there as a form of memory on behalf of a group so that they can track the value of the real economy as it is shared across the people in that community. The problem with simple [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system]Double Entry Bookkeeping[/url] is that it has been hacked time and time again because only a handful of powerful people have access to the book/ledger.

This provides a strong incentive to that small group to cheat the ledger by, for example: printing more money diluting the overall supply which then reduces the wealth of the population making it hard for them to price their labour. Our pounds and dollars no longer afford the same amount of electricity, food etc that they used to in most part because of money printing.

Here is a very good metaphor for how money works at a high level and why crypto currencies pass that test:

[center][url=http://youtu.be/zcskPf8i818]http://youtu.be/zcskPf8i818[/url][/center]

Happy to provide more comments and clarification.

Thanks for the welcome :-)
and the information, I recently came across the story of the stone coins in the books The undercover economist or The undercover economist strikes back I forget which one. I found it very interesting that really anything can be money even something that has no real practical value once the consensus is that a store of value is attributed to it and a ledger is kept by what ever means.
Another story that was a good example of economics problems which was also explained was the Capital Hill Babysitting Co-op which was a scrip based micro economy its a very interesting case study for getting you head around the causes and remedies of problems with an economy. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op[/url]