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by notahacker 3426 days ago
Sure, but avoiding hyperinflation is Monetary Policy 101. Most currencies in developed countries have never experienced a hyperinflation and never will because money is created via the fractional reserve banking system as credit for which there is a definite future demand for repayment and taxes denominated in that currency create additional future demand[1]. People are prepared to accept currency because they have future debts and expected future debts denominated in it, and that confidence is boosted because whenever the central bank sees price rises above the level it's prepared to tolerate it steps in to adjust the supply.

The BTC mechanism for attempting price stability on the other hand does the opposite: the supply is designed to grow very steadily, but with no reason whatsoever to believe a stable and sustainable demand for that particular cryptocurrency exists in future.

[1]Hyperinflations occur when the supply of money grows steadily without even bigger growth in future demand obligations, which in practice invariably happens because the government has resorted to printing it to discharge debts and release people from future tax obligations. This actually looks more like a Bitcoin economy (albeit with more potential for the money supply to grow really, really quickly) in that what the government is doing is decoupling supply from demand.

1 comments

On avoiding hyperinflation, it's certainly true that we know how to do it. For the infamous Weimar hyperinflation, I'd refer you to Adam Fergusson's When Money Dies; what drove the hyperinflation was two things, that the government was unwilling to control its spending (it risked France annexing the Saarland), and that the head of the national bank was poorly educated. When Schacht was brought in, in 1923 (10 years before Hitler; Schacht has a reputation as Hitler's banker, but had never heard of Hitler in '23), he was able to stabilize things pretty quickly: Britain had intervened to rule out a French annexation of the Saarland, and Schacht was more with-it on monetary theory than his predecessor had been.

The risk of Wiemar-like circumstances striking again in the West are basically zero, unless a Wiemar-like perfect storm of defeat and ignorance strikes again; and even then, hyperinflation never lasts long (no one can live under it for long). One woman weathered the Wiemar hyperinflation by selling one link of a gold Rosary chain a day to buy food; a quite modest amount of precious metal is enough to outlast this sort of disaster.

> hyperinflation never lasts long

How about Venezuela then ?