> Long term I'm bearish because it's a deflationary asset. Deflationary value stores have a tendency to cause all sorts of social ills by encouraging hoarding. There's a reasonable line of thought that observes that it's no coincidence that the end of the age of European colonialism coincided with the demise of the gold standard.

It's definitely an interesting theory - any particular articles or books you've read on the subject? I find the story of money fascinating.

On the other hand, however, States are no longer constrained by how much gold they have. In the past you could wage war until you ran out of gold and then that was that - you couldn't print money out of thin air. Now you can just print money and at least up until some point (which we don't know yet) it works. I guess you could argue back to your first point that this is what caused wars - you needed to accumulate resources in order to have wealth so you'd start wars and take stuff.

I think deflationary economies have bad attributes - like why take risks when you can do nothing and the value of your assets goes up? On the other hand, (and someone else mentioned something related to this) inflation literally destroys wealth so how can someone working a non-high paying job store wealth when the value of that wealth is destroyed at a minimum of 2% per year?