The Value of Nothing  

In 2020 I watched a documentary called The Price of Everything, it detailed the history of the modern art market and how it evolved and changed over the years. In the documentary we see paintings that go for more on the market than what some people would ever make in their lifetime twice over. I really like art and see why someone would pay a competitive price for a nice piece but still I was so confused, like how can these paintings be worth more than houses? The documentary uses a quote from the Irish poet Oscar Wilde “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Economists around the world must deal with all thing’s money, The pricing of goods, taxes banks, inflation all must deal with money in one way or another, but some economists have had trouble to concretely pin down what is “money;” Yap a small island in the Pacific Ocean is their answer. Their currency comes in the form of large limestone discs mined from limestone mines and delivered via ship to its destination. Everyone on the island uses the discs but more importantly they trust and believe in the discs’ value and have faith that ownership is accurately represented. The Stones are usually too much of a hassle to deliver when a transaction is made. The group in the transaction simply say that one’s disc is now another’s discs, and everyone agrees with that. To me that was strange how could a man trust that a piece of currency that is not in his collection directly was his? Trust is the answer not just trust in the value of the disc but trust in their neighbor their community to recognize the man’s ownership of the disc(s). This is a web of trust weaved throughout the island that makes up the value and ownership of the discs. Whether a disc is at the bottom of the ocean or across the island it will retain its value as a piece of currency even if its “invisible.” Imagine balling up a hundred dolor bill and throwing into the ocean and still using to pay for a ride or imagine going to a cash only restaurant and paying with money that’s at your grandma’s house in another country; seems unbelievable at first thought I know it did for me but when you think about it, we use this “invisible” money all the time. We use banks and money transfer apps like Venmo and ApplePay and trust that they send the correct amount a sizable number of the world trusts apps like that, apps run in part by machines and can fail to handle our money our metaphorical lifeblood that keeps able to participate in society. When I put it like that in my head it almost made more sense to trust a person that you can go a talk do directly having our money and then any modern way of management.  

Belief in a currency and its value is more important than the actual currency itself if the people you are presenting it to do not believe it is worthless in their eyes. The most common way for a major currency to lose value is inflation like what happened in Brazil. The belief in cruzeiro (the Brazilian currency before the real) was dwindling and things just got more expensive it got so bad that it got combative. After repeated failed attempts by the government the cruzeiro was scoured earth a currency that would never garner the trust of the Brazilian people again and something needed to change, and something did. The government hired four economists to save the brazilin economy; they created URV (unit of real value) as a replacement to the old currency. A virtual invisible currency to replace something tangible a real? The trick was that the URVs had value equal to the Curzio giving Brazilians a throughline to compare and the debt of trust the Curzio had not carried over to the Urv, a blank slate for Brazil to try again. The old currency was grandfathered out the Urv became real resetting that public belief and saving Brazil.  

Virtual currency is a common occurrence in video games whether it be gold coins or a spoof of the dollar the intangible money has been in games for a while and in the 2000s onward some have real world value. Many would hand wave this statement but if you think about what makes v-bucks for example different from URVs can a made-up currency for a video game become more valuable than legit cash, the answer is yes. Venezuela was a similar position to Brazil since 2019 inflation making their currency worthless some citizens turned to a game called RuneScape an early 2000s MMORPG to farm gold making a living wage in the process “A gold farmer can earn $40 a month, a tidy sum in a country where the minimum wage is worth $7.50 a month.” (the Economist, 2019 para 2). In this instance the collective trust in a currency’s value for a game made in 2001 was higher than the Venezuelan bolivar; the digital world beat the physical as lines of code dwarf printed paper in value. The value of digital currency, especially for multiplayer games, is so important to these companies that they hire trained economists to manage it for them. In game currency has become a growing market so much so that game companies make more from in-game currency than from the game itself. Same is true both ways gamers have been able to make money from the games they play, some owning digital property and other special items ranging from the tens to hundreds to the thousands and in rare cases hundreds of thousands of dollars. EVE online is a massive multiplayer space sim where players create their own factions who can start many business ventures in the game to make money and buy increasingly rare and expensive ships. These factions can clash causing a virtual war with a real-life dollar tag to it. In 2021 a war the biggest factions of the game broke the world record for the costliest video game battle of all time “with a full total loss of 3,404 ships destroyed. These losses totaled 29,111,604,784,863 ISK, equating to $378,012 USD” (CCP Log,2021, para 2). Something this costly could only have been done with the trust of the players and the value they place on their ships.  

If you think about it digital currency and online items it is all nothing, lines of code that could be deleted with one press of a button, but it is still there, we can feel its Mass through our screens its power through our wallets and its value in our hearts and that is what it’s all about. just like owning a piece of art, pulling a rare trading card, or owning an expensive car it is about what we as a people put into it with our collective believe we make these things mean something, to us and to others around us we make nothing everything. 

Citations  

The Americas. (2019). Venezuela’s paper currency is worthless, so its people seek Virtual Gold. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/11/21/venezuelas-paper-currency-is-worthless-so-its-people-seek-virtual-gold  

CCP Games Log. (2021, February 4). The most expensive video game battle ever earns two Guinness World RecordsTM titles for eve online. CCP Games log. https://www.ccpgames.com/news/2021/the-most-expensive-video-game-battle-ever-earns-two-guinness-world-records  

Friedman, M. (1991). WordPress.com. THE ISLAND OF STONE MONEY. https://counterintuitive2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stonemoneyessay.pdf  

Goldstein, J., & Kestenbaum, D. (2010, December 10). The island of Stone Money. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money  

The invention of money. This American Life. (2018, February 19). https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money#play