The other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.

There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.

Same thing with 401k enrollments at businesses. Management gets way more of a benefit from them than the wage slaves, but needs to maintain a minimum amount of people enrolled.

The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.

Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.

That cell phone cost as much as modern smart phones despite not adjusting for inflation as well. That was just to pay, they were so expensive per minute to use that most who had one avoided using it if they had other options. Which is to say real estate agents had them and they tried to keep all calls to under the first incoming minute free.

The mobile phones they had were absolute garbage, service was abysmal, and the security was non existent.

There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.

> A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.

That’s not a smartphone. Re-read what I wrote. No amount of money would have produced anything close to an iPhone.

The average rural farmer in India has instant access to a world of information and entertainment at his fingertips 24/7 via his phone

Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)

A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city

Without people to buy from, money is worthless.

Sometimes it's fun to realize that if we all just decided dollars were worthless, they would be. There'd be nothing the government could do about it.

Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.

My viewpoint is that money is a technology, and people will choose whatever technology works for their use. A technology can be designed so that some favored uses are much more likely than others. For our government money, those uses are as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. Also, some money transactions are delimited by regulations.

People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.

The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.

I’ve tried saying this the other way around to people and I’ve only received blank stares. Maybe I should describe it like that.

Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc

To the point about dollars, there very much is something the government can do about it: taxes.

If the government requires taxes to be paid in dollars, that sets a "floor" on the value of a dollar as a medium of exchange - for most people in the US living a "normal" life, you have to acquire some amount of dollars throughout the year, under penalty of jail/loss of property (property tax). Then, since you already have 300m+ consumers in a massive market using the currency, odds are you'll use it too.

The only way you'd truly render dollars worthless is through government action or malfeasance; the fictional scenario where every person on earth not only agrees dollars are worthless, but also agrees to forfeit all property in the US, all employment in the US, and interests in any US financial holdings is quite a few steps beyond the point where "the people just decide to rebuke the dollar's lack of backing".

Doing this in an environment where nobody is using dollars will lead to guillotines. The dollar has to be useful for exchange first, and then they can demand tax to be paid in it.

Uhm no? This is illogical. You just declared money worthless. Nobody is gonna bring out the guillotines if the government demands worthless paper. They'll happily give the worthless paper to the government.

How will they acquire the worthless paper?

So this thought experiment isn't just that "everyone decides dollars are worthless" but also that the state is dissolved, along with all the property rights and the govt's monopoly on violence?

That's more like saying "Dollars are worthless in a scenario like Fallout or The Road", rather than making any relevant point about government efforts to maintain fiat currency.

In the original scenario of "people decide dollars are worthless... nothing the government can do", my point was that the government has a lot of levers to pull to backstop value, albeit at a far lower level than today's dollar.

Any idea of an instantaneous, sweeping change, is utopian. But more gradual actions are possible. For instance the government could decide to let the dollar serve as a medium of exchange while discouraging its use as a long term store of value. They could do this by triggering a mild inflation, such as 2% per year, that would encourage people to move their wealth out of dollars and into things like land, goods, factories, etc.

The dollar wouldn't become worthless, but it would become worth 2% less per year.

No, they wouldn't. There'd still be debt in dollars, which would lead to people losing collateral etc.

What you say is true of Bitcoin though, since there's so little debt denominated in Bitcoin.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting

Consider the following scenario:

If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.

Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.

People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.

After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.

What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.