I have some news for you: Gold has been both deflationary and inflationary over historical time... because its supply varies based on how much miners can dig ou

I have some news for you: Gold has been both deflationary and inflationary over historical time... because its supply varies based on how much miners can dig out of the ground. That quantity may or may not relate whatsoever to the amount of value the economy created over the same time period. Instead of being at the mercy of a central bank you're at the mercy of the mining industry and how many gold deposits have been found. When the Spanish brought their stolen Gold back from the Americas it more or less ruined their economy by flooding it with cheap money (tons of Gold chasing too few things of value). A similar crash in Silver happened when the Comstock Lode was found. If you imagine that a precious metal standard would make the economy more stable you are absolutely wrong and history proves that. Gold is only preferable when the monetary authority has lost so much credibility they can't control the value of the currency anymore. Pegging one's currency to the US dollar is a modern equivalent of that idea. Of course now your entire economy is at the mercy of (US Dollar/Gold/Silver). If things go really well and you produce 25% more widgets... well congrats, prices across the economy must fall because there is a fixed amount of gold available to circulate or be stored. Of course that's not really possible so the distortions happen in lots of other ways and people inevitably turn to privately issued paper or bartering just to make life possible. Bitcoin has many of the same problems (inability to adjust money supply to economic activity) but it is slightly better than gold: we know it is deflationary (the supply of new coins decreases over time) so in theory all BT loans can have negative interest rates to account for that (deflation "cancelling out" part of the negative rate).