Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which ultimately leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the gap.
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What is money? Simple answer: Money is a medium of exchange. After that, things get a bit complex.
Some say money is a store of value, but in the event of inflation, money’s not a very good store. Similarly, money is a comparative measure of value, at any one moment in time, but again, not a very good measure over time.
Historically, money has been whatever a government said it was, because money is backed by the full faith and credit of the issuer, and historically, governments have been the issuers.
But, the times, they are a’changin’.
Modern money has no physical existence. Money is numbers in an account. Think of that seemingly universal explanatory example, the game of Monopoly. It has variously denominated bills that players exchange for properties, rents, fines and rewards. Those bills are not money. They are evidence of money; they are titles to money.
Monopoly easily could be played with a scorekeeper and scorecards instead of bills. Players simply could have their balances increased or decreased, according to the rules of the game. The notations on the scorecards would be money – and not the physical notations, but the “meanings” of the notation symbols. In fact, there is a computer version of Monopoly, in which everything is composed of symbols; nothing is physical.
Money then, is a score. It is wholly symbolic and not at all physical. But who decides what those symbols mean and who keeps score? The answer: Anyone whose full faith and credit is trusted enough. Players of Monopoly trust the game’s rules.
The U.S. government can create dollars, because Americans and foreigners trust the full faith and credit of the U.S. government enough to accept dollars (in accounting notations) in exchange for goods and services.
Banks too, create dollars, because Americans and foreigners trust the full faith and credit of the banks and the banking system, sufficiently to trust the accounting notations telling them how much money (accounting notation) exists in their bank accounts.
So let us change our definition of money: Money is a trusted score that is used as medium of exchange. Without trust, there cannot be money.
And we are not talking about absolute, unconditional trust. That doesn’t exist in this world. We mean the level of trust you have for the central government, for big businesses, for small businesses, for relatives, etc.
Read Understanding Federal Debt. Full faith and credit, where we describe the elements that go into trust, i.e. into full faith and credit.
Central governments and banks are not the only entities that are trusted to keep accurate scores. You trust the electric company. You trust the gas company, the phone company – at least at the level necessary to be the collateral for money.
For instance, many people have trusted the process behind the bitcoin, together with the currency exchange markets such as Mt. Gox. While this trust remained intact, bigcoin functioned as money. Recent problems with Mt. Gox have weakened bitcoin as a trusted currency.
Which brings us to: M-Pesa, a form of money based on the full faith and credit of mobile-phone companies Safaricom, Ltd and Vodacom.
M-Pesa allows mobile-phone users to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money, paybills and purchase airtime. Like all forms of money, M-Pesa is not physical. It is nothing more than an accounting service.
I urge you to read the Wikipedia description:
In 2002, Researchers at Gamos and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, funded by Department for International Development UK, documented that in Uganda, Botswana and Ghana, people were spontaneously using airtime as a proxy for money transfer. Africans were transferring airtime to their relatives or friends who were then using it or reselling it.
M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) is a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service for Safaricom and Vodacom, the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania
The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using SMS technology to other users (including sellers of goods and services), and to redeem deposits for regular money.
Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service. M-Pesa has spread quickly, and has become the most successful mobile phone based financial service in the developing world.
One rightly could argue that M-Pesa is not money, but rather a money-transfer service, but the line blurs. The airtime that users of M-Pesa purchase, is itself used as an exchange medium, i.e. as money.
The existence of M-Pesa, a corporate-based money service, evidences two features of Monetary Sovereignty truths:
1. Money is not physical. Money is an agreed-upon record. Those who claim gold or dollar bills or any other physical element to be money, simply are wrong. Vodaphone and Safaricom do not supply anything of a physical nature.
2. Sovereign money is unlimited. It never can run short. Vodaphone will not run short of credits for airtime minutes. Whether or not those minutes ever are used is irrelevant.Some may never be; some not. They simply are exchange units.
Vodaphone neither needs to borrow credits nor to tax users for credits. The terms “deficit” and “debt,” so often wrongly applied to the U.S. dollar, are meaningless when discussing M-Pesa airtime. Vodaphone does not need to borrow credits nor tax users to obtain credits.
Those who believe the federal government can run short of dollars, or have burdensome debts, or need to borrow dollars from another country, simply are wrong. The value of M-Pesa is based on the full faith and credit of the issuers.
But the real value of M-Pesa is the demonstration that money can be the child of any entity having sufficient credit. If you are trusted (and laws permit), you could issue money and have your money accepted.
I for instance could create “mitchells,” and create them out of thin air (just as the federal government does), by sending instructions to your bank, tell the bank to increase the balance in your checking account by an amount equivalent to a certain amount of mitchells.
My money would be of my own design, and would have no physical presence. If the banks trusted my full faith and credit, they would do as they are told, which would create more mitchells.
I never would need to borrow mitchells. I never would need to tax anyone to obtain mitchells. I simply would create it by sending instructions. If anyone paid me in mitchells, I would note the payment, but the mitchells themselves would be destroyed, as they are unneeded and so, have no value to me.
And none of the above has anything to do with gold or anything else that is physical.
Today, many nations supply their sovereign currency, Bitcoin and M-Pesa may be just the forerunners of many moneys provided by many non-government sources. While this may seem to exacerbate an exchange problem, in fact, the problem is trivial for computers, which instantly can make appropriate conversions.
The real problem is the one that exists today: The relative value of each issuer’s full faith and credit.
So what do you think? Are bitcoin and M-Pesa signs of the end of money or the beginning?
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
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Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D plus long term nursing care — for everyone (Click here)
3. Provide an Economic Bonus to every man, woman and child in America, and/or every state a per capita Economic Bonus. (Click here) Or institute a reverse income tax.
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
5. Salary for attending school (Click here)
6. Eliminate corporate taxes (Click here)
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
8. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here)
—–
10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.
Two key equations in economics:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports
THE RECESSION CLOCK
As the federal deficit growth lines drop, we approach recession, which will be cured only when the lines rise. Federal deficit growth is absolutely, positively necessary for economic growth. Period.
#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Tell this story to people who think the U.S. government can run short of dollars, needs to borrow dollars or needs to levy taxes. Money is just accounting, and the U.S. controls accounting.
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Roger – – –
There is one added statement needed in your description of ‘mitchells’. You have not explained why you would create any ‘mitchells’. There should be the following added to the article:
Why would I create some ‘mitchells’? This would be done because someone who trusts me would provide some good or service for the mitchells.
I know this is implied by your logic but it would help some readers who might miss the implication.
John Lounsbury
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Agreed. Thanks.
Rodger
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What about tax-driven money? Could I pay my taxes and government fees (federal, state and local) with the Mitchell currency? What if Mitchell’s aren’t accepted as payment by these government entities?
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When taxes are assessed by a Monetarily Sovereign money-issuer, those taxes are the money issuer’s method for forcing users of its money.
I could do much the same with “mitchells.” For instance I could offer you a brand new Rolls Royce for 100 mitchells, and your only way to obtain mitchells would be to work for one of my companies.
If you looked at all the details, and found that 100 mitchells would cost you about one hour’s worth of labor, you might do the work and pay me the 100 mitchells (which, like taxes, I’d simply destroy upon receipt, because I can create unlimited mitchells).
Of course, the federal government has the additional power of law behind it.
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@RMM: Got it: With the power of law, federal taxes are not even necessary – the government could just pass a law stating that the Mitchell’s are the currency of the land. I would prefer no federal taxes at all actually.
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IMHO you left out an important attribute of real money: the force to be used. Money should compel us to be used through pressure or necessity. Neither M-Pesa nor Bitcoin (which is a genuine ponzi scheme at heart btw) are mandatory.
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Yet M-Pesa, without being mandatory, is being used and it is growing massively. I believe another word(s), “mutual convenience” is operative, here.
In the U.S., dollars are not mandatory for the recipient. I have the right to accept euros from you, in payment of your debts. However, I do not have the right to refuse dollars.
Something similar is true of many debts discharged via M-Pesa. The recipient has the right to accept payment in M-Pesa. The difference: He cannot be forced to accept M-Pesa, unless by prior agreement.
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Are bitcoin and M-Pesa signs of the end of money or the beginning?
I think they are signs of an “attempt” to change money. Whether they can skirt the power structure is another story, because the powerful want to make money with money and multiply debt and will panic and do everything possible to stop any changes to their system that does not include them.
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Well stated:
“What is money? Simple answer: Money is a medium of exchange. After that, things get a bit complex.
Some say money is a store of value, but in the event of inflation, money’s not a very good store. Similarly, money is a comparative measure of value, at any one moment in time, but again, not a very good measure over time.
Historically, money has been whatever a government said it was, because money is backed by the full faith and credit of the issuer, and historically, governments have been the issuers.
Great:” Money is the NOTHING (a medium of exchange, storage, or measurement of value) that you get for SOMETHING (that which you wish to store, or exchange) for ANYTHING.” F. Soddy
It is as good as the sovereign governments “good faith and credit” to fulfill it’s mandate : Exchange!
How much good faith would you have for the exchange of “bitcoins, or M-Pesa’s.
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Roger
This video–(Stephanie Kelton) explains just what you are saying.
you can fast forward to 35:00 to see her explanation.Also” Bernanke says
money is no object we just use the computer to mark up accounts-fast forward to 52.22
http://www.modernmoneynetwork.org/seminar-2-monetary-sovereignty.html
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M-Pesa is a mobile payment system – like ACH, FedWire, etc.. It’s not a currency and it’s not money.
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You are correct — partially.
When airtime is being transferred, that airtime becomes money. And when accounts are created, from which depositors withdraw, those accounts contain money.
The difference between a bank wire transfer of dollars and an M-Pesa transfer of airtime is different in detail, but not in substance.
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M-Pesa and national money (e.g. the US dollar) are both systems of credits and debits. Please explain why you think they are different.
If you want to dismiss the entire article above as false, then please explain why you think the article should be dismissed, or else you will be dismissed.
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Rodger-
Another thought provoking post sir! May I please cross post this over at Daily Kos once again?
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Sure, Auburn. No problem.
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M-Pesa is no more money than an Outback gift card is.
If Vodafone, or Vodacom, or whoever, is essentially a monopoly, then their airtime credits may be almost universally acceptable, even though they have no value in themselves to a non-Voda customer. They may circulate and function, in that respect, a lot like government money, or government-guaranteed bank money does.
But if M-Pesa are a money, a medium of exchange, they are not like a fiat currency, but like a commodity-backed currency, and airtime is the commodity. It is not created from nothing like fiat money, it is created by labor and investment. If Voda issues more M-Pesas than the traffic their network can handle, they may not be able to redeem their “currency” for airtime, as they have promised, the same as a government on a gold standard is constrained. A monetary sovereign is always able to fulfill its obligations in its own fiat currency, but Voda can run out of bandwidth just like FDR could have run out of gold in Fort Knox.
Companies have been issuing “money” like this since the dawn of corporations, in the form of gift certificates and store credits. If the M-Pesa is the beginning of something, it is not that it is a new idea, just that the population seems to trust Voda’s “money” more than they trust the government’s money. That may signal the impending doom of that particular government, but not the end of government fiat money itself.
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You make good points. As I said, “One rightly could argue that M-Pesa is not money, but rather a money-transfer service, but the line blurs. The airtime that users of M-Pesa purchase, is itself used as an exchange medium, i.e. as money.”
M-Pesa seems to function more like a bank than an ordinary coupon issuer. Assuming the air time rights have no time limit, and when they are not used, but rather are traded (both true for many people, as I understand it), then under those circumstances they function as money.
Visualize you are a tribal member, who has no use for air time. You have received air time as wages, and no you bank air time with Vodaphone.
Later, you use that airtime to pay your bills, and receive more airtime for your labors. Given that scenario, I would call “airtime” just another word for “dollars,” “euros” or “pesos.”
Vodaphone actually does create airtime from nothing, as it it non-specific, and it does not exist in any physical form, and they can create unlimited quantities.
In those senses it is like dollars when they could have been redeemed for gold. (When the government ran short of gold, they changed the redemption, just as Vodaphone could, if necessary).
Nonetheless, we could argue the semantics of what is money and what is not money forever. My own feeling is, if it has no expiration date, and is non-physical, is created from nothing in unlimited quantities, and is banked and used as money — then it is money.
(The “quacks like a duck” theory.)
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Yes, it is blurry, and M-Pesa convertible to airtime is very much like dollars convertible to gold – or gift certificates convertible to steaks – but not like a fiat currency convertible only to itself.
But Voda cannot create unlimited quantities of airtime. They are limited, first, by the minutes and hours in a day, and second by the physical infrastructure used in their network. Unless they have unlimited resources to build cell towers and lay fiber, their ability to create airtime is not unlimited. If airtime could be created from nothing, then anyone could do it, and it would be very cheap, and there would be no demand for M-Pesa.
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IF (big “if”) airtime actually would be claimed, Vodaphone would be limited in creation of airtime, just as the U.S. was limited in dollar creation by its supply of gold.
That would make Vodaphone a monetarily non-sovereign money issuer, just as the U.S. was when it was on a gold standard.
However, I suspect “airtime” is something of a fiction, and most never will be claimed. If that is true, Vodaphone can create unlimited amounts, and would be Monetarily Sovereign over airtime.
Again, if you wish to prove M-Pesa is not money, I have no objection, though the millions of people using it as money — buying, selling, saving, depositing — might disagree.
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I don’t know about “prove”. Whoever gets to define “money” gets to say whether it is or isn’t.
Some other random thoughts:
Money denominated in airtime has a built-in, fairly rapid inflation. My cell plan today includes unlimited airtime for less than I used to pay for a fixed amount, which was less than I used to pay for a much smaller amount. The price of airtime is on a steadily decreasing path. Why would a user hold an M-Pesa – not redeem it for airtime, or “spend” it on something else – when he knows he will be able to buy one in the near future for substantially less?
What will happen to M-Pesa when Voda goes to “unlimited talk and text” pricing? Or when a competitor does?
Do Verizon and AT&T operate in Europe?. Don’t they have unlimited plans there like they do in the US? If not, it’s only a matter of time.
To the extent that the airtime is never redeemed, Voda is profiting from seigniorage, just like a government can do. If they get away with it for long, no doubt others will follow.
For accounting purposes, Voda would have to book a liability (“pre-paid airtime”) when they receive the cash and issue the M-Pesa. Over time, the amount of that liability would shrink, as they drop the price of airtime (and of new M-Pesas). For a business that periodically raises their prices instead of lowering them, that would not work out so well. I guess that’s why Outback gift cards are denominated in dollars and not in steaks.
“secure means of payment for people who do not have easy access to banking services.”
“Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service.”
Kinda like payday loans, title loans, mafia loans – taking advantage of people who have no alternative.
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Yanis Varoufakis, on the dangerous myth of apolitical money:
“Bitcoin enthusiasts, just like believers in the Gold Standard, understand money as if it were some commodity which has spontaneously emerged as a unit of exchange – a little like cigarettes did in the POW camp ‘economy’ that R.A. Radford (1945) described so brilliantly. This is a gross misconception based on the unexamined (and dangerously false) faith that there is no substantial difference between Radford’s POW camp and a modern capitalist economy; that, like in that POW camp, output is independent of expectations and demand is always abundant enough to absorb the produced output. As for investment, it is assumed to be uni-directionally determined by savings which are, in turn, determined by the rate at which present consumption is deferred to the future. None of that holds in an economy involving not only exchange but also production and investment. It is these two activities, production and investment, that exclude the possibility of apolitical money.”
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I agree with the premise of MMT being a medium of exchange. And reading your post reminded me that the $ is based trust. That is where I feel MMT has a weakness, especially for the US, being the world’s reserve currency.
The concept of ‘monetarily sovereign nation’ I understand. My question concerns the level of trust required for the dollar to be accepted all over the world. When we buy energy; oil, natural gas, on the world market it is traded in dollars.
What would happen if the dollar was no longer the world’s reserve currency? If we can’t supply all of our needs; consumer goods but especially energy, wouldn’t we essentially go bankrupt? Or at least begin a long slow slide into a very poor nation?
Example:
If Russia didn’t have lots of oil and natural gas to sell on the world’s market. And had to import almost all of their energy, would the Ruble be useless?
Everything in Russia would essentially be priced, not in rubles, but rubles compared to whatever currency they used to buy energy.
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The Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the Yen, the Yuan, and many others are not the world reserve currency, and their economies do about as well as the American economy, on average, sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Because the dollar is the main world reserve currency, the US budget and trade deficits are larger in order to satisfy the savings demands of foreign governments. If those countries spend those dollars rather than save them, sales of US goods and services would increase, and the US trade deficit would decrease, perhaps even turn to a surplus until the excess savings were soaked up. Likewise, the US government deficit would decrease. Employment in the US would rise in order to satisfy the increased demand for US goods.
If MMT becomes widely accepted, I think that will happen. There is no need for a monetarily sovereign nation heavily involved in world trade (such as China) to have large reserves of other currencies, unless they are trying to manipulate the FX value of their own currency. Small countries with few exports might need some foreign reserves for valid policy reasons, but could use Euro or Yen or Yuan or any other currency traded on FX markets, or a mix of them, just as well as dollars. The regime of a single world reserve currency will go by the wayside, eventually.
The FX value of any currency depends largely on the demand for the exports of the nation. Without oil, Russia and the ruble could be in trouble, because they do need to import other goods. The US is not such a “one-trick pony” as Russia is. Many third world countries are policy-constrained by the lack of world demand for their exports.
There does need to be trust in the sense of an expectation that the government will continue in power, but the FX value of any currency, even the reserve currency, is based on what it can buy: the exports of the country, today. The Ukraine currency is in more trouble today because of the political possibilities that it may not exist for much longer (in addition to the Ukraine’s debts denominated in foreign currencies). Those are not risks that the US faces.
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Exporters need to export. If you have an export-led policy, then you need import-led countries to buy your stuff or your economy goes up the creek.
Aggregate demand overall for imports is limited by the increase in world income. There is nowhere else for the exports to go in the short term other than where they are currently going. (Hence the moaning of German exporters when sanctions were imposed on Russia – and the dances of joy from their Chinese competitors).
The exporters’ financial system will use its currency liquidity powers to ensure that there is enough of its own currency in the system to allow the transactions to complete end to end. Otherwise the transactions run out of the right sort of money and never complete.
Which is why, overall, there is a tendency for foreign financial savings to migrate towards the central banks of export nations – often into special funds. That’s what liquidity swaps do if you’re trying to hold your currency down to help your exporters.
Not everybody is as bare-faced as China, but ultimately it ends up with the same result. Export nations acquire a lot of foreign financial assets that they can’t get rid of because the currency move would destroy their exports. And that continues until they decide to stop being export-led.
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Exactly. And if China understood MMT they would likely abandon their “export-led” mercantilist policy.
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Regarding China, what good reasons, if any, are there that the Chinese could never have a World Reserve Currency, and take the place of the USD? Since China is a major exporter, the U.S. only uses USD, is this a factor? If China started only accepting Yuan for payment for their exports to the U.S., would this affect anything? What if oil was sold in currencies other than USD?
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China is a perfect example of why having the world’s reserve currency has little economic effect. They seem to be doing quite well without having that distinction.
Currently, their GDP is about half of the US’s, so it may be quite a while before the world decided to replace the dollar with the renminbi.
I’m not sure why anyone cares, however.
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“Regarding China, what good reasons, if any, are there that the Chinese could never have a World Reserve Currency, and take the place of the USD?”
None at all. Depends on the willingness of other countries to hold their currency as reserves, which would be based on its safety and stability relative to others. China and Japan have an agreement now (or maybe still in the works) to hold some of each others’ currencies as reserves.
“Since China is a major exporter, the U.S. only uses USD, is this a factor?”
I don’t see why it would be.
“If China started only accepting Yuan for payment for their exports to the U.S., would this affect anything?”
I suspect Chinese companies either change dollars to Yuan as they are received, or accept only Yuan already, and it is up to the buyer to do the FX transaction. Surely their prices are listed in Yuan only, not adjusted daily for FX fluctuations.
“What if oil was sold in currencies other than USD?”
I think it might be already. Probably the published price is in dollars, but is easily convertible and either the buyer or seller can convert the currency if they want. I don’t see why the Saudis wouldn’t accept Euro or Yen or Yuan instead of dollars, at the proper exchange rate. They might even consider it advantageous to diversify their foreign currency holdings.
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Is M-Pesa money? Read this: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-31/forget-bitcoin-african-e-money-is-the-currency-killer?alcmpid=view
After reading the article, define “money” and let me know what you think.
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Is M-Pesa money. yes, because it is a physical symbol of a value being held by the owner that can be exchanged for any other value.
The problem arises when what value that ‘money’ will have when it demands exchange.
The computer dot representing the exact amount to be exchange is the exact same as any fiat currency dot, dollars,euros,or yen,etc.
ALL money is value or wealth because it is an expression of “value owned.
All money is subject to the ‘good faith and credit’ and ability to redeem
money into another form of wealth.
All wealth is only partially expressed by money.
SO “Justaluckyfool” says,”When the world was made there was enough wealth for all of mankind to share; we need only to properly govern that wealth.
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That article says
“M-Pesa is not an electronic currency as such. In every country where Vodafone has introduced it, the system uses local fiat money, which the operator keeps in banks. Rather, it is a substitute for debit cards and mobile banking apps.”
Quite a different description than using airtime as currency. It’s not clear what he means by “currency-killer”, if not simply a cash substitute available to people who don’t already have one of the many other cash substitutes.
If banks in these countries charge their customers for safekeeping of their money, for paying bills electronically, or for electronic funds transfers, then this will be popular because of its lower fees. My banks do all that for me for free, or pay me interest, or pay me rebates on credit card transactions. I can’t imagine why I would want to pay the bank to do those things.
Money is simply a debt denominated in some unit of account. Anyone can create money. The trick is to get it accepted.
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It also says
“Many mobile banking applications are clunky, filled with security features and unnecessary steps. ”
That’s what we need, a banking application with less security.
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Ryan wants $5.1 Trillion in federal spending cuts and a “balanced budget”:
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ryan-budget-unveiled-cuts/2014/04/01/id/562979/
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Ryan wants to fool ; All the people, all the time.
But he will *only* get 5 or so million (Hey that’s a 4.9% gain).
Carmen Basilovecchio @justaluckyfool
This has gotta be “APRIL FOOL” !
Ryan Budget Cuts Spending by $5 Trillion Over Next 10 Years http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ryan-budget-unveiled-cuts/2014/04/01/id/562979 … via @Newsmax_Media
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Rodger, in a recent post you equate money with debt. I completely agree, but for argument’s sake lets formulate that as money equals obligation. In the case of dollars, the issuer is obligated to accept dollars for payment of taxes. In the case of M-pesa the issuer is obligated to provide cell phone service. With bitcoin, I don’t see an obligation, just a greater fool dynamic. Am I missing something here? Money implies debt, debt implies a debtor. Who are bitcoin’s debtors, who’s faith and credit are to be relied on?
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All debt has collateral. The collateral for all money is the full faith and credit of the issuer.
Full faith and credit is a set of guarantees. List the guarantees the issuer of bitcoin provides. That is the full faith and credit.
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