>Most of the things that crypto proponents tout as features (transaction irreverisibility, lack of inflation, etc.) are in fact bugs, and they just don't realize it because they don't realize how finance and economics actually work.

These are not inherent features of cryptocurrencies, there are cryptos with reversible transactions and inflation.

>inflation

I always wonder if we were taught inflation was good, or if inflation is actually good.

Im going with the first, because logically I dont agree, but the government kept telling me it during public school.

> (transaction irreverisibility, lack of inflation, etc.) are in fact bugs

They weren't bugs for the thousands of years when gold was used.

> they don't realize how finance and economics actually work.

You probably mean the last 40 years of finance and economics, since our modern monetary system has really only been around since Nixon took the US off the gold standard after the US over spent due to the Vietnam war and Charles de Gaulle started to exchange his dollars for the quoted rates of gold.

Transactions with physical currency are reversible, just not easily so. And solid gold was rarely used as a day to day currency, so you would have an amalgam which was subject to inflation as the government either changed how much gold backed it, or phsycially reduced the amount of gold in the coin.

For thousands of years people used actual gold, especially countries moving money back and forth between them.

Inflation in its current form didn't really exist. The exchange rate for gold of a country's currency didn't change much, if at all. The dollar went from $20 per ounce, to $35 per ounce during FDR, then lost the vast majority of its value, getting us to over $1,300 per ounce that we have now.

Physical money requires the person giving it back physically. Crypto currencies have a chain of transactions, you can just send the balance back to one of the addresses it was sent from. There isn't much difference there.

> They weren't bugs for the thousands of years when gold was used.

Growth rates during the Dutch Golden Age were about 0.2% a year, with very brief peaks of up to 1%.