Money Money Money

I'm not so sure that guaranteeing that everybody would be equally wealthy is a good thing. I suppose it depends on how this equality would be achieved. If you just confiscate the wealth of the richest people and redistribute it, you will reduce the incentive for people to improve their financial position. If carried to the extreme, you would end up with everybody being equally poor by reducing them to the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, if you increase the opportunity for people to acquire wealth by doing honest and productive work, that would be a good thing. It would not guarantee financial equality, but it would make it possible for everybody to become richer than they already are. Some people will still be richer than others because some people are more ambitious, more talented, and luckier than others, but everybody should be better off than they were before.

I already knew most of what I read in Old Dog's link, except the part about how bitcoin came into being and how one would go about getting some of it. I am not interested in trading some of my regular money for bitcoin for the same reason I don't want to trade it for German Marks. If I was planning to travel to Germany, I would certainly want to carry some German money with me, but I am not planning to travel to Germany, so I have no use for German money at this time. There are people who trade national currencies back and forth every day, but they do this for a living and presumably know what they're doing. I understand, however, there is a way to earn bitcoin by a process called "mining". Of course there is no actual digging in the dirt involved, that's just what they call it. I might be interested in that if I knew how it worked, and was able to master the skills involved without going back to school for a PHD or anything like that.

When the US went off the gold standard back in the 70s, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth by the right wing nuts with whom I was associating at the time. I didn't see what the fuss was about, since the government had been circulating more money than they had gold for some time. If you're not going to back all your money with gold, I don't see the point of just backing some of it.