Since McDonalds doesn’t keep a Big Mac in a vault for every coin they issue, but rather make one whenever a coin is spent, it’s the exact same principle as other currency. And like other currency, its value derives from everyone’s trust in McDonalds’ ability to keep making Big Macs in the future.
It’s not the same principle because it’s always one Big Mac. All the dollar stores are one dollar and up stores now.
Yeah, but a Big Mac today isn’t the same it used to be, either.
They still use 1/10 pound patties, but they weigh them uncooked, and meat today has more water in it that’s lost during cooking.
(This is why the general view that Big Macs got smaller and McDonalds’ claim they still use the same size patties are both true, by the way.)It’s not the same principle because it’s always one Big Mac.
Big Macs used to sell for $.50 and now they sell for $8. So one could argue the coins are actually a hedge against inflation.
Incidentally, US Forever Stamps serve a similar purpose.
our money has no value anymore since it was taken off the gold standard
Our money has value because it can be redeemed to pay down US-based debts, particularly tax debts. This is - and has always been - the real value of any currency. Go ask David Graeber for the details. But the TL;DR; is that we use coinage as a form of extortion. “You need to give us stuff to get coins which you can then pay us to avoid the threat of state violence.” Roman soldiers working overseas were paid in coins, while they were charged with collecting these coins as a tax, in order to integrate conquered economies into the Roman Empire. You had to provide goods/services to the soldiers so they could take them off you every taxation period.
Literally, money is a protection racket.
Also, who the fuck wants to eat a Big Mac? That shit’s disgusting.
until they just decide the promotion is over and they don’t have to accept them anymore
While a big mac has intrinsic value, the value of the coin is based on trusting McD honouring the agreement. Will they still accept the coins 10 years from now when they have forgotten they were issued? Will they be sued out of existence after their meat substitute mushroom burger left in the sun for too long comes alive an eats 9 customers and and a minivan?
The value of the dollar is based on trusting the US central bank and/or governmemt to be responsible enough.
While you should not blindly trust either McD or the government, the latter has a longer track record, even though they seem like they are going to eat a metaphorical minivan soon.
I dunno, I wouldn’t take a bet on wether the US will outlive McDonald’s or vice versa.
Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold. There was nothing magical about being on the gold standard.
Money is just IOUs created by the government. The government uses them to pay for goods and services it wants. If the government wants someone to guard a building, they pay in IOUs. Then, every year, the government taxes everybody in the country and demands that they return a certain number of government IOUs to the country. It’s this obligation to pay taxes that gives their IOUs their value.
The person who was paid to guard a building is left holding a pile of IOUs. Fundamentally, they’re worthless. But, there are other people in the country who have to pay taxes and aren’t doing jobs for the government. So, the guy with the IOUs goes to the farmer and says “I know you’re going to need to pay taxes and don’t have any IOUs, I’ll trade you some of my IOUs for some of your vegetables”. After that exchange the farmer has enough IOUs to pay the government at tax time, and the guard still has enough to pay his own taxes.
Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold.
You also trusted that the supply of gold would not suddenly increase and devalue gold as a commodity. Or that demand for the specie doesn’t collapse because… let’s say, hypothetically, the world’s largest economy stops keeping it as a reserve currency.
The former happened in the second half of the 16th century, in an event known as the Price Revolution.
The latter was part of the Nixon Shock, following the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.
Incidentally, Nixon exiting the Gold Standard could more rightly be pinned on Charles DeGaulle.
In February 1965, French president Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to redeem U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. By 1966, non-U.S. central banks held $14 billion in U.S. dollars, while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserves, of which only $3.2 billion was available to cover foreign holdings.
In March 1968, the London Gold Pool collapsed.
In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, unwilling to sell further Deutschmarks for U.S. dollars.[10] In the following three months, the U.S. dollar dropped 7.5% against the Deutschmark, and other nations began to demand redemption of their U.S. dollars for gold.[10] On August 5, 1971, the United States Congress released a report recommending devaluation of the dollar in an effort to protect their currency against “foreign price-gougers”.[10] Also in August, French president Georges Pompidou sent a battleship to New York City to retrieve French gold deposits.[11] On August 9, 1971, as the dollar dropped in value against European currencies, Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.[10] Pressure intensified on the United States to leave the Bretton Woods system. On August 11, Britain requested $3 billion in gold be moved from Fort Knox to the Federal Reserve in New York.[11] As Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the United States Department of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, later put it:
Will they be sued out of existence after their meat substitute mushroom burger left in the sun for too long comes alive an eats 9 customers and and a minivan?
Idk if I’m going to pick a fight with a restaurant chain that can harness that kind of firepower.
Honestly I’d bet McDonalds will outlive the US government. It’s one of those companies that is literally too big to fail
This feels like a viral ad
It’s working, I want a Big Mac coin! McD messed up my order plenty of times, and I never got a voucher, they just fix the problem. And I’d feel weird pretending to be upset, just to get a nice shiny Big Mac coin.
Given the existance of The Big Mac Index, which seeks to compare global currencies and their respective buying power, this is actually fascinating.
Interestingly, Taiwan has one of the lowest big Mac prices but that doesn’t really correlate with their purchasing power
Honestly, even more fascinating. …why???
Demand theory of value
Shortly after Donnie finds out…
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The RADICAL LEFT wants you to eat bugs and kale. NOT ON MY WATCH! We are building a massive reserve of Big Mac Coins. High quality, high VALUE! I met with the Hamburglar—great guy, very misunderstood—and he agrees: the Mac Coin is going to the MOON! Crypto is fine, but you can’t eat a Bitcoin! A total disaster for SLEEPY JOE, but a HUGE WIN for your stomach! 🇺🇸🍔💰 🇺🇸#BigMacStandard #FastFoodFinancials
Far too coherent, this was definitely written by an intern not DJT himself. ;-)
Not NEARLY enough ALL CAPS
Lol, corrected!
But who wrote it if there’s no sign-off of the author’s initials??
I’m personally offended that I wasn’t thanked for my attention to this matter
How old is this post? USD was fully off the gold standard by 1971.
Fiat currency is socially constructed and would cease to exist if we stopped believing in it. It’s just that the value of gold works exactly the same way.
Isn’t fiat currency functionally based on taxation and the value represented by the tax?
We have communal effort, we tax the community to pay for that effort to pay the workers, and the value created by that labor is thus the value of the currency.
The work makes debt, we tax to pay down that debt. The currency represents the movement of the value between parties.
So long as movement is sustained we have value that backs the currency.
Thus so long as we have community we have value.
BitCoin? 🤚🙂↔️
Big Mac Coin? ️☝🙂↕️️
That coin is clever because some people would rather keep the coin and the coin probably costs less to make than the Big Mac.
Yeah my first thought was “dang that’s neat how do I get the coin?” and I don’t even like Big Macs.
Edit: they’re available on eBay for $10 or less, some below $5.
seems like OPs statement rings true if they’re worth upwards of 5 dollars
Sounds like we are one step away from Mcdonald crypto coin backed by the big mac
Why do people assume gold has intrinsic value? I just saw today they were freaking out about how much gold is fluctuating, it is just as imaginary as the dollar.
Technically the Big Mac does provide some form of intrinsic value in the form of food for the homless. but for the average person it would actually give them more value to take the big mac away so it has sorta a negative value, negative intrinsic value, I think I just invented that.
This comment actually made me think and look it up. I never thought about this. Why is gold valuable?
Yeah you were basically right. Because societies decided it would be. I mean gold has some practical applications but nothing that would justify it’s price.
First link I found says this:
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Gold’s value is ultimately a social c- onstruction; its worth is sustained by ourcollective agreement about its importance and our belief in its future value.
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Gold’s physical properties—its lustrous quality, relative scarcity, durability, and difficulty of extraction—reinforce and justify its perceived value.
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Unlike other precious metals, gold strikes a balance of being rare enough to be precious but abundant enough to serve as a practical medium of exchange.
So I guess rare enough yet abundand enough and durable enough.
Wild tbh
Planet money had great episode on this topic if you’re interested https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1197959089/-price-of-gold-periodic-table-elements
But without gold how will we ever make high quality HDMI cables?
That’s a bit light on the “balance” many metals are precious and fairly rare, their physical characteristics like being poisonous, being visually indistinguishable from various cheap metals or malleable to the degree they will wear out as a coin are some issues.
Now look up conspiracy theorists who are obsessed with gold standard and its abandonment.
Btw, we just transmuted our first gold just recently.
Yeah but was the process cheaper than buying it? Converting a million dollars of lanthenides and energy into a few thousand dollars of gold isn’t a great trade off
Well, no. And I think it was just not a few atoms. But we did it.
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The word “fluctuating” implies the price of gold has been going up and down. That is not what has happened since the Commander-In-Thief took office.
Market price of one ounce of gold over the last five years:
That’s a zoom out of 5 years Gold prices don’t move in a straight line. On a day‑to‑day and week‑to‑week basis, there are ups and downs - it zigzags it is absolutely fluctuating but the bigger problem is the sharp incline which suggests it is in a bubble.
And none of any of that has anything to do with anything I said.
Even so, in a scenario where all the currencies fall apart, Gold and Silver are very probable to become the basis of wealth.
Nowadays, stuff like SiIicon and Copper are pretty high value (and similarly, Germanium), but they really depend a lot upon hard to measure purity which goes with high-technology.
So Gold and Silver, which are easier to determine with lower technology (unless someone uses high-technology to spoof them) and also easier to make into useful products, will tend to hold intrinsic value.Value of iron and others, break down due to abundance, while steel depends upon technology and expertise.
Also because gold and silver are what people will mentally default to. Even if you develop a quick, easy, and free test to determine the purity of cobalt or neodymium and demonstrate how they’re more functionally valuable, people will still default to trading au and ag to buy the amount of those metals they need. Copper would be next.
So why gold? Because everyone knows that enough people will trade for it, in the same way you know your landlord, grocer, and bar will all take your country’s currency, and that’s why you accept it in exchange for your labor
Yeah, and that’s why crypto is not catching up well.
Kind of a chicken and egg thing.But in case of Gold and Silver, there had to be some initial driving factor for when it was first popularised (before people just started mentally defaulting to it).
Even though archaeology suggests that there were some civilisations did use notational currency in times before the relatively modern, well known history, enough of them did go with Gold. And since this was during the time when long distance trade was way slower, I won’t consider the case of some single power influencing everyone else without any other driving force behind Gold itself.Gold and silver caught on because they are rare for surface deposits making them rare, non reactive making them good for coins. Soft and easy to work with, again good for coins. But durable enough and most importantly heavy enough but not too heavy to be not easily lost. Again making them good for coins.
It literally just comes down to they were useful to make coins.
Look to South America where they would “waste” oodles of gold on religious rituals.
Practicality is first, foremost and the only reason something catches on and then STAYS popular.
Over time that practical reason can fall away and stop mattering but to get started you need practicality
Yep, you got it.
Gold and silver originally became commonplace as money, as currency, because they are excellent material to make coins out of.
You can carry bits or coins of gold and silver on your person, and you can denominate them fairly easily, you can store them and they won’t corrode, and its not that hard to weigh them or melt them down.
Compare that to trying to haul around a backpack or trailer full of bigmacs.
Yeah, they’re pumped full of preservatives, but they won’t last anywhere near as long as a non reactive metal.
Nowadays… well, gold and silver are massively important components in computer technology.
So they’ve got the historical basis as money, and the commodity basis of having a significant amount of vital industy dependant on them.
Bitcoin people used to argue that bitcoin would be a superior currency to all other currencies for a myriad of reasons… but you will always need some kind of computer thing that is either made out of or at some stage of industrial production involves gold/silver/other metals to even be able to transact with bitcoin.
In a modern, capitalist, international fiat currency context, you also can’t escape some kind of supply/demand based on use case dynamic for currencies.
Oh, your economy is imploding due to a debt/bond/stock/trade balance crisis?
Less ongoing demand for holding your wealth in that economy’s currency, even if it is in bonds that pay interest or stocks that are nominally appreciating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
We are currently basically reverting to a pre Breton Woods international monetary system as the USD implodes, central banks everywhere are hoarding and repatriating gold as the de facto international exchange mechanism, as geopolitical monetary turmoil rises.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1437/sp500-to-gold-ratio-chart
So basically, if at the beginning of 2024, you had $100k in the SP500, you would have ~$146k right now.
If you had $100k of gold at the beginning of 2024… you would have ~$275k right now.
Thats 1.46x vs 2.75x.
That’s gold outperforming the SP500 by 88%, in just over two years.
That is a dying economy and currency.
Gold went from about $2000/oz in early 2024 to about $5500/oz at time of me writing this.
I think it was like a week ago that Goldman Sachs or somebody said gold might hit $5400 by the end of the year.
Yep there it is.
So uh, we did a year in a week.
I think the fact that they’re pretty, nonreactive, rare, and were available very early is huge here. Gold is just there sometimes, little flakes and beads washed to rhe surface. It’s one of the only metals you find non metallurgical cultures using. From there it became valuable for jewelry and ritual objects because of its rarity and appearance, and once you have something durable, reworkable, and more desired than possessed it becomes a really easy thing to trade, especially when cross culturally valued.
Gold is nothing but an uncertainty indicator proxy, if gold price goes up, people are unsure in the market and future returns and thus buy gold, if the price is low the market and economy feels stable and people don’t buy gold
Question for you:
Is there any gold involved in the process of you typing and posting that comment?
Could there maybe be, I dunno, gold, literally as a direct component in, or vital to the manufacturing process of … maybe some kind of computer chip or something?
Sure, gold has its actual uses, that’s why it’s marginally better than bitcoin, but the majority of gold is in jewelry or used as a investment vehicle.
It would be, if enshitification didn’t exist. Who knows if McDo decides one day to reduce meat or other expensive ingredients? Or substitute ingredients?
It’s like Schrodinger’s Currency.
It’s either full value or zero value.
You either get a big Mac or McDonald’s decides they are no longer accepting coins, or rather no longer accepting them from you.
I guess in a way - that is all currency 🤔
We got McBretten Wood system before gta vi
GTA is for scabs now anyways
Come to think about it, mass buying food vouchers wherever possible during times of extreme currency instability is probably not a novel idea.
People traded black market food-voucher derivatives in the Brazilian hyper inflation…
It made it easier to redeem all of them as soon as you got a hold of them, because they wouldn’t buy the same thing through the entire month. Natural gas vouchers were more stable, though, so those only traded at face value.
