It's just like real estate.... "They're not making any more land, you know".

That's why housing prices always go up.

Oh... wait.

AFAIK no currencies are based on the gold standard any more. In fact the current financial powers are in violent ( i.e. military ) opposition to any gold standard as it would reveal just how little intrinsic value is backing the major world economies.

Money has no intrinsic value. This is true for major currencies like USD, EURO, YEN just as it's true for BitCoins. Market value is derived from the ability to trade money for things that do have an intrinsic value. This isn't controversial, it's a known thing.

That's because nobody cares about your specific gold vein -- they just care about the global gold market. When you run out, they'll just buy it from some other mine. I'm assuming you don't have the last mine on the planet, right?

Now, if every gold mine in the world ran out, *that* would get interesting.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

All I have to add to this currency discussion is:

If $10 gets me a nice lunch today and I put $10 in the bank today, when I go to the bank for my $10 + interest next year, if it cannot buy me a nice lunch at that time, *then I have been robbed*.

Any currency that can prevent that is a perfect currency in my eyes. So far, only gold and silver have come even close to that.

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If all else fails, reboot...
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No, you haven't. It's just that your investment choices didn't happen to keep up with inflation.

Why should I have to be worrying about investment choices? I just want to put my $10 in the bank! *INVESTING IS THE SCAM*

Anyway, this inflation thing doesn't make sense. Prices go up, I get paid more. It's just a waste to time and robbery for the people who are retired and have their life-savings turn into nothing.

At the end of the day, printing more money causes the value of the money to go down. So you are not better off than where you started. The only person who wins with this is the person who has the power to print the money and spend it before the market corrects their thieving.

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You do realize that if we go to a gold standard (which pretty much by definition kills off fractional reserve banking), that the entire world's capital structure just falls apart.

It's an idea that hasn't really been thought through by its proponents.

Oh, and the US and Eurozone capital structure isn't in the first stages of falling apart right as we speak.

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If all else fails, reboot...

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Oh, it certainly is.

But vaporizing 6/7 of the world's money (assuming a 15% reverse requirement) isn't really going to fix that issue.

It's not going to fix the issue. My point is that we should not have left the gold standard in the first place.

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Agreed. But keeping the gold standard would mean transfer of wealth to nations that mine gold. It must have been far too tempting for people who are, lets face it, self-interested sociopaths to base money on promises they can break later rather than something that physically exists. Now the governments of the world are so tied up in the fiat currencies that they must prevent a gold standard currency at almost any cost.

BitCoin is the new gold standard, except crypto not gold and without having to mess about with heavy pieces of metal. It's peer2peer so the fascists will have a really hard time getting rid of it.

You don't really have to sweat getting rid of something that has zero traction.

You're kidding right? All "they" have to do to get rid of it is ban it's use for any legit transaction.

Then have fun with your valueless arcade tokens.

Yeah! Just like they banned all the other decentralized peer2peer stuffs like torrents.


Oh, wait....

In most of the world "they" banned cannabis years ago. Possession even has a death penalty in some countries. It's still traded just about everywhere. The same with harder drugs. Banning things doesn't get rid of them.

All the governments can really do is refuse to take it to pay tax which is how current governments ensure people use their 'valueless arcade tokens' instead of some else's 'valueless arcade tokens.'