What is money? No one really has an answer to this, because money in this day in age is a tangible thing that has no real value other than what one knows it can buy her. A 20$ bill can buy 20$ worth of goods, that’s it, nothing more, nothing less. Money changes hands for things that one pays cash for, but anything that someone buys, or pays online, nothing changes hands but numbers in a computer. What the reporters on the NPR article say is that money is fiction, and it is. We don’t know how much of it is out there, we have no clue where it goes, and no clue why things cost as much as they do.
We as a society base our lives around something that only exists because we have faith in it. An American would hear of a society who based their currency off of rocks that belonged to whoever they said it belonged to and say “Wow, that’s pretty primal, that makes no sense at all.” Realistically though, we aren’t much different than the Yap, with full faith in their coin shaped rocks. Today we trust that our money belongs to whoever we give it to, just like the Yap trusted the fei outside their house belonged to a certain individual three villages away.
A perhaps even more abstract of currency arises with Bitcoins, a virtual currency that isn’t tangible at all. A Bitcoin, according to the article by Anne Renaut is a string of immensely complex code that can be “mined” by anyone looking to invest in the online currency. Recently Bitcoins reached a record value of 266$ per one coin, but soon after the coin had a serious crash, lowering prices to about 54$. This is evidence that currency, whether virtual or real, is very volatile and unstable. Bitcoin fanatics however say they enjoy the complete anonymity of the coin. This could create a serious problem though. Since the money cannot be tracked, it can be used for things such as human trafficking, drug deals, and black market purchases without any threat of being tracked. So I think that after a period of time governments will realize that anonymity in a currency can cause problems, and perhaps they will find a way to shut down Bitcoins.
When a nation pumps tons of money into the economy to try to boost the economy it seems to always have a reverse effect because more money means more people will be willing to spend their money, inflation goes through the roof, then a depression happens. Then those same families who had an excess of money are now short of money, and a depression ensues. Japan however is so far doing a great job in creating a stimulus without destroying the economy in turn. So far they have managed to keep interest rates stable while lowering the price of the Yen.
As much as I would like to believe that money is a very stable and predictable asset, it simply is not. For the Bitcoin, the value is decreasing because everyone took advantage of the extremely high prices, sold them, and drove the price right into the ground. In Japan however, the prime minister has so far successfully stimulated the economy without any negative effects. The more I think about it the more it perplexes me, why do things work in some places but crash and burn in others? I have no clue, but perhaps that just the nature of currency. The currency will do what its users make it do.
Works Cited-
“The Curious Case of Japan’s Economic Stimulus.” Truthout. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2015.ulus <http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14070-the-curious-case-of-japans-economic-stimulus>
“The Bubble Bursts on E-currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo News Singapore. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2015. <https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html>
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
I felt like I took an extremely scatterbrained stab at this assignment, I’m afraid I may have misinterpreted the point of this assignment. Help?
Feedback provided. —DSH
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Thank you for your question, YouDontKnowWhoIAm,
I’m going to break with my own tradition and begin with global comments (overall essay) first, then offer some local (paragraph and sentence level) feedback. My hope is that while revising to respond to the global critique you’ll make enough changes so that the smaller local blemishes will disappear. Once the post shapes up, we can concentrate on minor copy-editing matters of grammar and punctuation.
Global comments:
At a glance, your essay seems to be organized correctly: four economies, four paragraphs, plus an introduction that identifies the core problem you’re planning to address. That should work. And it would except that you haven’t decided whether you do understand money or you don’t.
For the most part, you express your confusion at the mystery of it all. I’d suggest you follow through with that point of view without exception and see where it leads. But be honest about what’s truly mysterious. Your introduction mixes up observations of too many types, therefore confusing us about the direction your argument will take. Plus, you make several claims that even you do not believe or care about. My reactions to the three claims that close your introduction amount to: 1) we don’t need to know how much money there is, 2) we can easily track where most of the money goes if we want to, but that doesn’t make it mysterious, 3) we understand the mechanics of supply and demand well enough to make this claim untrue.
When in doubt, if your introduction serves no purpose, or serves a negative purpose, get rid of it completely and see if your second paragraph can serve as your first.
We act every day as if money has real value, when in fact it is utterly worthless unless we believe it to be valuable. That’s not a terrible opening, AND it touches on the central mystery that you can trace through the rest of your paragraphs. Americans accustomed to the look and feel of dollar bills and metal coins find it hard to conceive of any other method of counting wealth, and find the notion of the Yap using stone disks the size of cars to be inconceivable. But . . . .
Save a paragraph for the observation that we only THINK we use dollar bills, when in fact most of our transactions are virtual . . .
And then the idea of a literally virtual currency like Bitcoin won’t seem so mysterious, just another step in the abstraction chain . . .
Then save a paragraph for the real mystery: why we believe in the value of any currency, when all of them are subject to unpredictable value changes, like inflation . . .
It might also be useful to speculate whether inflation was possible on Yap. Do some currencies lend themselves to oversupply?
All the material is here. Only the focus is missing.
Local comments:
Based ON! Not based around. Not based off.
You use too many pronouns, YouDontKnowWhoIAm. They get you in trouble.
With:
Without:
Throat-Clearing:
I’m not sure this observation will last to the next draft, but if it does, you’ll want to eliminate the repetition of “anonymity could cause problems,” once before, and once after.
With something more like this:
Grade Code 5D3
Critique the critique: If you appreciate receiving feedback, YouDontKnowWhoIAm, please reply to indicate whether you found the critique helpful or not, and if so, how it was helpful.
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