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> It's not a fringe view: It still needs to be substantiated. > In the United States, adherence to the gold standard prevented the Federal Reserve from expand

> It's not a fringe view: It still needs to be substantiated. > In the United States, adherence to the gold standard prevented the Federal Reserve from expanding the money supply to stimulate the economy, fund insolvent banks and fund government deficits that could "prime the pump" for an expansion. Argument by authority combined with argument by assertion. why do you think that devaluing people’s money and inflating the price of assets that the wealthy already own is going to help poor people feed themselves? Per Krugman, the point of quantitative easement is to decrease wages in real terms while keeping the same nominal price.

leereeves 6y ago
Anything more than citations would be too much for a HN comment. There's more depth in the citations for the excerpt I linked. To oversimplify: Bitcoin has a limited supply, the majority of which is already held in too few hands, many of whom have a HODL attitude that prevents circulation. It also has transaction fees and technical obstacles that prevent circulation. How can Bitcoin ever be widely adopted as money without strangling the real economy? Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich. And if Bitcoin won't be widely adopted as money, how is it going to be anything more than an speculative asset traded from one hand to another, with any profits extracted from a new speculator (sometimes called a pyramid scheme)?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich. This leads to greater concentration of wealth. Since people don’t seem to understand that, we have this feedback cycle where policy leads to concetration of wealth, which cause people to advocate policies that lead to further concentration of wealth, over and over again. People need to break the cycke by realizing that printing money causes assets (held by the rich) to appreciate, and wages (earned by everyone else) to decrease in real terms.

leereeves 6y ago

Anything more than citations would be too much for a HN comment. There's more depth in the citations for the excerpt I linked. To oversimplify: Bitcoin has a limited supply, the majority of which is already held in too few hands, many of whom have a HODL attitude that prevents circulation. It also has transaction fees and technical obstacles that prevent circulation. How can Bitcoin ever be widely adopted as money without strangling the real economy? Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich. And if Bitcoin won't be widely adopted as money, how is it going to be anything more than an speculative asset traded from one hand to another, with any profits extracted from a new speculator (sometimes called a pyramid scheme)?

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich. This leads to greater concentration of wealth. Since people don’t seem to understand that, we have this feedback cycle where policy leads to concetration of wealth, which cause people to advocate policies that lead to further concentration of wealth, over and over again. People need to break the cycke by realizing that printing money causes assets (held by the rich) to appreciate, and wages (earned by everyone else) to decrease in real terms.