Most people get the difference between nominal and real.

If your assets/incomes/wages increase from 100 to 105 while general prices in the economy increase by 10%, you had a nominal increase in wages or wealth but a real decrease. You are, economically speaking, worse off – even though, to the great disbelief and confusion of both my mother (https://aier.org/article/money-blindness-and-money-clarity/ ) and my girlfriend, the numbers in your account are bigger.

To confuse people maximally, I therefore sometimes put it this way: The nominal is the real thing you see -- the sticker price; the real is the invisible thing you don’t. Hence “money blindness” or “money illusion.”

While most Bitcoiners understand this in specific examples at the micro level, they often fail to see it in the macro perspective.

This came up beautifully in a long-read from Reason Magazine today (https://reason.com/2024/10/23/the-remarkable-redneck-air-force-of-north-carolina/), about the relief efforts in North Carolina:

This example directly gets to what economists really mean when they say “real.” They don’t merely mean “adjusted for inflation,” but real -- reality, actual, physical -- goods and services. A check for $750 -- or indeed any amount of dollars -- won't do you any good when the stores remain closed or when you can't transact with others. In recent weeks, the people in NC had a real problem, not primarily a monetary problem. (Fair enough, others -- esp along the edges where the regular monetary system still operate -- can turn money into real goods and move them into the disaster area.)

Money is merely a veil between real-world economic transactions, coordinating labor and capital and efforts and investments and all the other financial things we do every day. When you “pay” for something in the store with cash/bank balances/bitcoin, economically speaking you’re “paying” for that with previous efforts (labor, investment returns, gifts from other’s surplus). Goods trade for goods, only with money as a temporary bridge.

More examples: Robert Breedlove and Mike Hobart talked about this in a podcast at length a few years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI_JPezxecE), emphasizing that bitcoin is amazing for people escaping war zones since they can leave with their assets intact.

That’s a pretty stupid take, as far as things go.

For bitcoin to be used as an asset bridge between [destroyed warzone] and [new refugee home] you must have already had your wealth in bitcoin. Because at the point of a war breaking out or capital controls imposed etc., you will not be able to sell/realize the full value of your physical/captured/stuck assets. = bitcoins' awesome ability to move undetected within a persons head is not the same as moving real goods and services across a border.

The Resistance Money guys (https://aier.org/article/bitcoin-is-resistance-money/) had this observation, too, in an anecdote from Ukraine about a woman named Alina, “a Ukrainian refugee who fled Kyiv with her children in early 2022. Alina’s family stored their wealth in two ways. They had a house, and they had bitcoin. At the time of writing, Alina doesn’t know how that family home is doing; she hasn’t been there for over a year. And there was, of course, no time to sell the home before leaving nor any obvious buyer” (p. 276).

They couldn't "realize" (=make real) the monetary value of their local asset.

All rushing for the exits at once are going to clog the system. If we all flush the toilet at the same time, or unexpectedly turn on all the lights in our houses in the middle of the night, not all will be serviced.

Money -- including on a bitcoin standard -- is just such a system. It coordinates real economic activities.

In a flowy piece from a few years ago, I sarcastically put it this way:

"it took monetary economics many centuries of hard work and laborious testing to figure out that we indeed cannot eat money. Though – and this is the Earth-shattering point – we can trade other things for stuff we can eat, and money is a civilizational-changing vehicle for that, as it moves value both across time and place." https://www.aier.org/article/you-cannot-eat-bitcoin/

THAT’s the real(!) difference between the nominal and the real.