Central banking doesn't prevent creation of currency out of thin air. It just ensures that only the governing body of the central bank can do it. And the gove

Central banking doesn't prevent creation of currency out of thin air. It just ensures that only the governing body of the central bank can do it. And the governing body of a central bank will likely have an agency problem. There is a significant incentive to capture some of the growth in the markets that use the currency via manipulation of the money supply. The market would prefer that nobody be in a position to capture that growth, because then everybody wins in an expansion, but then the downside is that everybody loses in a contraction. But then again, the market also prefers a currency with a stable value. The fixed coin-creation schedule in Bitcoin was intended to remove any central authority for currency creation. But as it turns out, it's really hard to predict the demand for a currency that far into the future. For a long time, the old standard, gold, was mined, refined, and coined at roughly the same rate as economic growth. The world economy grew by 2-3% per year, and the total gold supply grew by 2-3% per year. So gold was a very stable currency. It took large movements of metal, such as Mansa Musa going on Hajj, or the exploration and exploitation of the Americas, to push the markets out of tolerance. Central banks have the capability to replicate that stability. But they do not. They skim off the top with monetary inflation that outpaces economic growth, to make currency that is held slowly lose its buying power, and prices slowly rise over time. The public justification is that currency that appreciates in value is spent less frequently, but that buying power has to go somewhere. It doesn't go to the people already holding currency. It goes to the one that creates the new money. I'm not certain that cryptocurrencies have the ability to mint new coins at exactly the rate of economic growth and also distribute the new coins fairly. At the least, spends within the system could be gamed to simulate growth that does not actually exist, and at the worst, someone could figure out how to profit from that.