Despite its imperfections, it has proven to be better than the alternative of not having it and has created an area of stability
  • daniskarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    I remember these little sample bags with all the different coins.

    I still have some of those saved somewhere.

    Also the plastic cards that you tilted and showed a value in € and pts (our old currency).

  • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
    4·
    10 months ago

    I went to Europe in the summer of '99. I still had to get my bank to get me all of the currencies for those countries prior to going and don’t recall having seen Euros at all at that point.

    • federalreverse-old@feddit.deEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      The Euro as a currency was introduced in 1999 and at that point was only used for banks/institutions to interact with each other. Euro notes and coins were only introduced in 2002.

      • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
        1·
        10 months ago

        Ah, yeah; that’d explain it. I am kinda glad I got to see all the different countries’ notes and coins. It was a bit of a pain-in-the-ass, though, when a Swiss ATM decided my US ATM card looked delicious. Last leg of the trip was pretty rough without the ability to get cash.

  • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.worldEnglish
    126·
    10 months ago

    The Euro. solid second or third tier currency. I’m surprised Europeans want to celebrate this also ran fiat currency.

    It was always runner up to the dollar up until the financial crisis. Once everyone realized there was no centralized response from Europe and they had to deal with a dozen different central banks making their own policy it quickly fell out of favor.

    I’d rather carry Yen as an alternative to the dollar than the Euro.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    477·
    11 months ago

    25 years of inflationary currency constantly losing value and bank bailouts. No thanks.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      402·
      11 months ago

      What alternative do you suggest? Please tell me it’s not crypto.

      • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
        552·
        11 months ago

        K it solves this problem but hold onto your constantly devaluing fiat is you prefer. Your Euro’s portion of the supply decreases every year. Your BTC’s portion of the total supply stays the same every year. Your euro or BTC’s value may change relative to other things, but since the Euro central bank targets an inflation rate of 2%, it’s designed to lose at least that much value each year. And y’know, in recent years, has lost a lot more. Fractional reserve banking ensures there will need to be bank bailouts sometimes because banks are ‘too big to fail’. You will pay for those with the value of your Euro while the rich people who own banks don’t. Money printing doesn’t hurt them, their wealth is tied up in assets, not cash. Money printing hurts poor and middle class, who have the greatest portion of their wealth in money. Bitcoin solves all of this. It solved it over a decade ago.

        Most cryptos are scams. Bitcoin has kept to its original economic policy and enabled sending transactions across the globe 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack. You can send transactions in less than a second for pennies in fees to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. It has a market cap of 850 billion dollars, that’s bigger than sweden’s GDP. It does this for less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables.

        Bitcoin and crypto are not the same. This will be the year Bitcoin is finally dead though, right? Finally all those users moving trillions of dollars a year in value I mean crypto bros will get whats coming to them and the entire Bitcoin ecosystem will disappear overnight because it was based around nothing but hype.