Yes, money! Actually, to be more exact, this only applies to fiat currencies, but believe it or not, money is the longest running “scam” of all!

Money has been around for thousands and thousands of years, and the “scam” has been perfected through its history making it so perfect anyone can see it and know about it and still not realize it’s a “scam”. Now, don’t get me wrong! Money is a great thing. And everyone likes it, including me. So the problem isn’t money itself (it’s actually a great concept if you ask me; much better than exchanging goods), but the way it’s being handled and controlled. But to understand this, we first need to understand how money actually works.

So here’s a quick explanation. See, money is being printed by the government only! If you tried to print some on your own, you would probably end up in jail for counterfeiting money. And why is that? It’s actually to avoid some dumbass printing a bunch of 500€ bills and causing inflation and by that lowering the value of euro. But where does value actually come from? Why is 10€ worth 10€? Well, the value of a currency used to be determined by the amount of gold possessed by the country / a fixed amount of gold (the gold standard). But as the “scam” perfected over the decades the gold standard was abandoned and a new system was introduced which is (unfortunately) still being used to this day. This new system basically allows the government to control the value and amount of a currency in existence. Now, this doesn’t mean one day the government can just decide that a 10€ bill previously worth 10€ now has a value of 100€ as this would again cause inflation (which is nothing good for an individual or economy). That’s why pretty much every government in the world has decided that a small amount of inflation is best for a stable economy.

OK! So where’s the “scam”? Remember when I said that the government can control the value and amount of money in existence? Well that’s the problem! Because the government can print more money just to pay off its debts and later destroy some money collected from taxes to retain its value. Now this isn’t as simple as it sounds, but it definitely is possible. Also, another “scam” are taxes! Now, of course taxes can also be good. But things like sales tax are just stupid, if you ask me! It’s just government taking your money you made by selling a product or service! Dumb, right?!

So I think I don’t need to say much more about this except for the solution. So my proposed solution is to encourage usage of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It doesn’t just take the control away from the government, but it also makes transactions much faster, easier, secure and cheap. You don’t even have to pay the transaction fee if you don’t want to (paying the transaction fee makes the processing of the transaction getting confirmed as valid faster). And even if you do, you usually pay only around 2 – 6 cents no matter the amount of money you’re trying to send! For example, someone made a transaction of around 6 milion dollars in bitcoin and only paid 6 cents for the transaction fee. If he was to wire transfer that money he would pay at least $500.000 for the transaction fee! And that’s not all! Bitcoins are IMPOSSIBLE to counterfeit as they do not exist in a physical form (digital only) and every transaction is confirmed by complex mathematical and cryptographic algorithms to ensure that the person sending the bitcoins actually owns them. The bitcoin network actually keeps a full record of ALL transactions ever made called the blockchain, which allows the network to check the validity of bitcoins just by searching through transactions and looking for all the transactions in which these same bitcoins were present. This allows for a 100% secure system! Isn’t that cool?! And another super awesome thing is that the whole blockchain is public while still keeping the people who made the transactions completely anonymous (It does that by making your only identifier an address which is just a random string of characters and numbers; the address can be changed after every transaction to increase anonymity even further).

So I think I’ve covered pretty much everything I wanted. There are a few other minor things I could write about (and a lot more things to say about Bitcoin), but I’ll save those for some other time

Tadej Gašparovič, 9.a