April 5, 2019
The Flintstones & ICOs
Since digital assets are in the news in the wake of Corp Fin’s big announcement a few days ago, I couldn’t resist this: Given that I maintain “The World’s Largest List of Flintstones Characters,” I was drawn to the debate over whether the Flintstones lived in a bitcoin & blockchain world. Here’s the intro from this Financial Times’s article:
There’s a lot of sense in Nouriel Roubini’s column for Project Syndicate on ICO flimflam and it’s all undone by one big mistake: “The fact that everyone within a given country or jurisdiction uses the same currency is precisely what gives money its value. Money is a public good that allows individuals to enter into free exchange without having to resort to the kind of imprecise, inefficient bartering on which traditional societies depended.
That is precisely where the ICO charlatans would effectively take us – not to the futuristic world of “ The Jetsons,” but to the modern Stone Age world of “ The Flintstones” where all transactions occur through the barter of different tokens or goods. It is time to recognize their utopian rhetoric for what it is: self-serving nonsense meant to separate credulous investors from their hard-earned savings.”
No. This is wrong. The Flintstones has a currency. Clams.
Clam shells are subdivisory units of the sand dollar, which commonly trades for goods and services either in the form of a flower-like token or a paper bill that closely resembles the US dollar. The Flintstones franchise gives a clear and consistent representation of a fiat monetary system where shells and sand dollars themselves have no intrinsic or representative value, but exist within a sophisticated economy that includes a banking system, a shadow banking system and an insurance system. Clams function as the system’s standardised, centralised, universally accepted, frictionless, low latency and fully fungible stores of value.
Meanwhile, according to this article, a guy was cited for speeding in a neighborhood while he donned a Fred Flintstone costume and was driving a real-life “footmobile”…
Poll: Vote for Your Favorite Flintstones Characters
It’s never too late to vote in my long-standing poll about which Flintstones character you like best. Nearly 10,000 votes have been cast over the years – right now, Fred barely leads over Barney, with Wilma & Betty tied for third. Then, there’s Dino, Bamm-Bamm, Great Gazoo, Mr. Slate, Pebbles and Arnold the Paper Boy. And many more. Vote anonymously now – you can’t let Mr. Slate beat Pebbles!
– Broc Romanek