I’m going to keep this short but I just fell down the rabbithole of crypto again and maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought. Many of their ideas are very similar to the fediverse’s. The idea of decentralized finance using a stablecoin sounds awesome to me. (though i’d much prefer to live in a world where money isn’t needed) Maybe the technology is actually good but the techbros and scammers ruin it with their false promises and complicated words. Hopefully, in a few years after the rest of those scammers have moved on to scamming with AI this tech could be truly used for meaningful purposes.
No that’s not it, sorry. If you’re genuinely interested in the actual meaning of fiat, and how it’s different to currency that is pegged to a fixed quantity of some precious resource, a good place to start is wikipedia. One important distinction is that fiat money can be created or destroyed at the issuer’s discretion. This is a big part of why most governments left the gold standard in the 20th century, and a big part of the motivation behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.