When money is not real

As the crypto economy grows, we will be facing different problems and issues as a society. One of those problems is the little value people, and especially kids and young teens will give to money as they will not feel the real value of it.

A few decades ago, credit cards appeared in the market. Initially, you needed to have a wealthy bank account to have your credit institution issue you one of them. Now, anyone opening a bank account gets a credit card offered just because banks know people tend to spend more when they are not experiencing giving away "real" money in the form of bills and coins. Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor has been teaching behavioral economics for many years, and he discusses this issue on this short video.

 

As the economy gets more tokenized, the issue will become bigger for new generations, so I believe it is important for parents and educators to show kids the real value of things. There's one ted conference video that presents this problem with a real experiment. It is very illustrative to see how kids change their behavior when facing real money in a game instead of points or tokens.

It is true that more and more, there are ways to generate "virtual" money the same way there are ways to spend it. But going through the experience of converting it to fiat before spending it is a great way to realize, no matter if we deal with digital or crypto value, we still live in a "real" world where things have to be paid with fiat.