[aeternum]

Ability to print money can be good and useful, but governments have a long history of going overboard. The benefits of printing money are immediate and tangible and the pain tends to lag and are widely distributed (hurting everyone that holds the currency worldwide).

Fiat currencies definitely have their place, but so do hard assets. And it may turn out to be useful to have a hard asset that is much more easily divisible, transferrable, and more resistant to seizure than gold.