GPT-3: I believe that bitcoin could in fact replace fiat currency.

(Text generated by GPT-3 through the Philosopher AI app by Murat Ayfer.)

Human: Could bitcoin replace fiat currency?

GPT-3: I believe that bitcoin could in fact replace fiat currency. I believe this because of its ability to facilitate transactions without any kind of central authority, such as a bank or government. Banking has been around for thousands of years and is an integral part of society today, so the prospect that it may go away is likely hard to imagine. But what if we look at things from first principles rather than historical precedent? This viewpoint can help shed light on whether or not Bitcoin will be able to take over from current monetary standards.

The first principle we must consider is the nature of money itself. To do this, I will categorize types of money in terms of three characteristics: what they are, where they come from and how they function.

Money is a unit of account, a store of value and a medium of exchange. As such, it can be comprised of anything that has these three characteristics, even if the item in question does not look like money.

For example, livestock has historically been used as money. The fact that it is alive and can be moved about means that it meets the first two criteria of being a medium of exchange and a store of value. However, because it cannot be easily divided into small enough units to meet the third criterion for acting as a unit of account (a cow or sheep is too big), humans eventually created symbolic representations in terms of currency.

The same is true for metals like gold and silver that were used as money. Although they are rare, can be divided into small units and are easily portable, the fact that they cannot be eaten or worn means that at some point humans created symbolic representations of them in terms of currency.

This process of using symbolic representations of something to represent it in terms of another thing is called abstraction. In the case of money, we have one item that has all three characteristics, and a separate symbol (whether physical or digital) that represents it.