Re:Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000
by cycrutchfield on Sunday November 26, 2017 @08:20PM
(#15784132)
>People have used assets like gold as money for thousands of years without long term inflation and it worked very well.
You think that the amount of gold in circulation has been constant for thousands of years?
Re:Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000
by closeparen on Sunday November 26, 2017 @10:42PM
(#15784643)
I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have the economy of 1917-2017 than 1417-1517. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that we’ve had, y’know, industrialization and a rapidly rising standard of living. “It worked for thousands of years before the industrial revolution” is an exceedingly poor argument for an economic system.
The progress of the last 100 years has a lot more to do with technological progress and less to do with the economic structure.
Technically the US was still on the gold standard up until the 70s.
Re:Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000
by closeparen on Sunday November 26, 2017 @11:17PM
(#15784793)
Well sure, I'm not arguing that monetary policy is responsible, only that "it worked fine during feudalism" is a silly argument.
Yet you're not suspicious that folks who have bitcoin claim deflation is useful?
> without long term inflation and it worked very well
Au contraire, past attempts at maintaining a non-inflationary currency have failed.
People have used assets like gold as money for thousands of years without long term inflation and it worked very well. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've been sold the idea that our money should be worth less tomorrow than it is today. Put that way it sounds like a bad thing and that's because it is a bad thing.
One way of looking at inflation is that it's a motivator to encourage us to give our money to other more powerful people before it loses its value. Those more powerful people are the people who told us that inflation is a good thing.
Cryptocurrency takes monetary control away from the rich and democratises it.