[XorNot]

So here's the thing...there was a long period of time where empires were on the gold standard. Spain during the early American colonial period was one such empire.

Spain did really well out of it's brutality in the New World - plundering the Inca and Aztec empires yielded a wealth of gold, and the big find in the salvage industry today is still "spanish gold" because just so much of it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

But now a question: did the Spanish economy boom from this influx of gold they had (through a substantial expenditure of resources), suddenly acquired?

The answer is: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Spain#Gold...) No.

Spain actually experienced massive inflation and then an economic crisis as the government suddenly found itself, bizarrely, bankrupt. Gold wasn't worth remotely what it was before, because gold is not actual productivity - the conquest of the new world was a conquest of gold, at the cost of real resources - food, men, timber, arms etc. But it didn't yield anything that was actually worth trading for other then just more gold. So prices skyrocketed, and suddenly the Spanish empire was raising taxes - despite in theory having "made money" because it couldn't afford to pay for its own upkeep.

What does this have to do with the concept of loans? Quite a lot. Because the exact same factors would apply to a government with a wealth of productivity which was forced to seek loans from a market: demand for currency drives the value of currency up, but the same thing happens - farmers, workers, everyone else winds up poorer because the value of their labor is being reduced relative to the value of currency. So currency holders get richer, but everyone else with bills and day to day living expenses are getting poorer.

[devmunchies]

yes, just because a nation is on a gold standard doesn't mean they can't have devaluation of currency, like when spain dumped a bunch of gold into the market from south america.

Cryptocurrency wouldn't have this problem, since it has a hardcoded limit, unlike gold or USD.

[XorNot]

A government which has to "seek loans" for crypto by definition must be trading in something which is not crypto internally. Because a government can't directly trade it's own citizens productivity (hence taxes), and can't mint new crypto to repay such loans in response to productivity.

So in such a scenario there are only two options: increase taxes on citizens for crypto they hold (while in the meantime being unable to pay for services upkeep - and thus probably inventing a form of fiat anyway to stay afloat), or devalue it's own currency to pay escalating loan rates to crypto holders to buy more crypto for those transactions in which people will not accept fiat.

Of course since taxes can only meaningfully be levied in the crypto-world on income, since you can control businesses to some extent but not holdings, the effect is the same: the compensation for your labor goes down, or you're fired (because the value of your output has gone down faster then wages), or most likely, you are inefficiently taxed at a much higher rate then is necessary to ensure the government is never stuck with the risk of a crypto shortfall which would suddenly put their ability to supply payment for services into almost immediate default.