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Money has so many effects on how people act dailey. Money also has a different value for everyone. In America most people work everyday for it. It is what they need to survive that pays for all their bills. Money is fiction though. It is made up and the value depends on the people and government. For example in the NPR podcast, “Money is not solid. Its value could disappear.” This states that money can be lost even if you are saving it in a bank. I find myself trying to find a strong purpose for money after listening and reading about how it is not real. Also it is used to kind of control us. People use money as a way to show that they are better than the other person. I think money should not be taken that seriously and only be used in positive ways.

In Brazil people stopped believing in their currency because they had crazy high inflation that the government would just increase monthly up to eighty percent. The people of Brazil stopped believing that there was any value in their money. This made the money no longer have any value because the citizens did not believe in it. People believing in the value of money is what makes it worth something. The inflation was so high because the government wanted to start a project and were printing a ton of money. The government made over fifty million people believe that their currency meant something again when there is no actual proof to support their claim. They got four guys to make a plan on how to get value back in the currency. The four guys told Brazil to not make money as quickly. They also made a new fake currency that was virtual. It changed into URV. People were getting paid in URV and made things like milk priced off of that. URV are not actually real and made people think that prices of things were better than before. It is kind of scary to think that your mind can get changed by something just being called something else. 

The island of Yap used a stone currency to buy and exchange for items. Stone money was their way of representing money. The island did not have metal so they had to go to stone. They had people fetch the stone. Milton Friedman stated, “ As their island yields no metal, they had recourse to stone”. The value of this stone currency was up to the people and what they wanted to believe it was. The people just accepted that this stone had a value and needed it to buy items. This currency is so big that people do not believe that you need to have it in physical possession when exchanging with another person. They make an agreement with one another and it does not have to leave the other possession. It is a weird concept because in America you usually use physical currency to buy something. If you do not have the cash or credit card you would not be able to leave the store. The people were once transferring a stone but had to leave it behind because there was a storm that made it difficult for them to continue with it. So they left it behind and told the islanders. The islanders did not really care and they put it in circulation.

The invention of cryptocurrency completely changes the global monetary landscape. It changes it because it is not reliant on a central authority or government. Cryptocurrency does not rely on banks to verify transactions. It is basically run by the people that can receive and send payments to each other. The digital money is held in digital wallets. The digital money is usually spent to get into things online and can be used for online transactions. There is a blockchain that records every transaction. This changes a lot though because it is a whole new way of using money. Just like money, the digital currency like Bitcoin works in the same way. A Bitcoin’s value is up to the people that make its value. In the article from Yahoo,”We believe that as the value of Bitcoin grows, and the infrastructure around it grows and matures, the price relative to other currencies will get more stable.” Bitcoin is not as good as actual money or dollars because it is harder to attain. It is also very expensive because not a lot of people have it and those people value it very highly. Also it is difficult to actually use Bitcoin because not a lot of places take it. You rarely see stores or online sites say you can use Bitcoin. I would not say that in-game currency is more abstract than Bitcoin. That is because I feel like in-game currency is a lot easier to understand. In-game currency is the currency in game that you buy with real money. You can not spend in-game currency in real life. You can only spend it in the game. There are multiple things you can buy with the in-game currency in game. Bitcoin would be more abstract because people make the value of it not a big company. I also feel like it is difficult to understand Bitcoin.

What I have learned from reading the Stone Money article and listening to the podcast is that the value of money is basically up to the people believing in it. My opinion from doing this assignment has definitely changed. I feel like taking money less seriously because it is fiction. But money unfortunately runs the world and need it to survive.

References

“The Bubble Bursts on E-Currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo! News, Yahoo!, sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html. Accessed 4 Feb. 2024. 

Kaspersky. “What Is Cryptocurrency and How Does It Work?” Usa.Kaspersky.Com, 9 June 2023, usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-cryptocurrency. WordPress.Com, counterintuitive2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stonemoneyessay.pdf. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.