Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) couldn’t let pass a flawed argument about what fiat money is, so he penned a new post.  Excerpts:

“Money is not money because of ‘common agreement.’ No common agreement ever happened.”
-
“Money is money because it is specifically useful in fulfilling the function of exchange. Money is money because its specific properties make it superior in exchange to other alternatives.”
-
“Governments realized that if they could force the population to use a specific arbitrary money – say instead of pink triangle paper maybe green rectangular paper – then they could create that money at whim and benefit from it. It is not hard to understand why politicians would love this scheme: they get to dish out benefits by magically creating tokens that they themselves force people to accept as ‘legal tender.’ But while it’s not hard to understand why governments approve of their own fiat tender, it is very hard to understand why the public accepts this scam…”
-
“For those who learn about Bitcoin, it is not hard to understand why it is now succeeding as an amazing new form of money.”

 - http://bit.ly/11gd1b1 
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135552.0 (Further discussion of the post)

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews