[cyphertruck]

When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them.

The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal, effectively confiscating the nations wealth and replacing it with massive fiat inflation. It was a period of monetary inflation that caused and economic contraction.

One if the ways inflation is used to indoctrinate people against their best interests is demonizing “deflation” by conflating it with the contraction in the Great Depression.

A grandma on fixed income shouldn’t have her prices go up %30 because politicians wanted to spend trillions to pay off bribes, as we have seen in the past year, where our monetary base was increased by $7T (or more) with only a fraction going to benefit Americans.

There is nothing yet discovered that can replace proof of work. There are a lot if people selling scams who think proof if work is a weakness, but they are always centralized (ethereum, dash) or PoW masquerading as something else, or simply not a cryptocurrency (ripple).

[qwytw]

What about a farmer with a "fixed" mortgage on his farm who can no longer afford paying it since grain prices fell by 50%? (Which is something that actually happened to millions of people). There is hardly anything worse that can happen to a modern debt based economy than significant deflation.

Claiming that the great depression or the long depression that preceded it were not exacerbated by the governments inability or unwillingness to artificially inflate the money supply is delusional. The deflation rate was above was 9% in 19931, 10% in 1932 this continued until 1934 which when prices started rising again, however 38 and 39 again had negative inflation.

The period preceding the great depression was not inflationary either, inflation in 1921 & 1922 was -10% and -6.15% and the rest of the years had relatively low inflation. In fact the Dollar's value only fell back to what it was in 1920 in 1946.

[mrpopo]

> The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal

Look, I'm not going to try to convince you. You're trying to protect your assets by denying reality, maybe you have a family to feed, maybe you just want to go to the moon, whatever.

For everyone else, I invite you to study history. The depression happened before anyone touched the gold standard. Countries that abandoned the gold standard earlier have recovered faster. Don't believe me, please read books.

Other important note. You can become rich with Bitcoin, yes. Being richer doesn't make you smarter.

[UncleMeat]

> When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them.

As we all know, there was remarkably little oppression of the poor back when we used the gold standard and minting new money was limited.

[rspeele]

It's not quite universal to say inflation robs from the poor. Some poor people like your fixed-income grandma example are hit hard by inflation. Some are hardly affected since they live paycheck to paycheck and don't keep savings. Others benefit from it -- in particular, those who have more debt than savings. Inflation is good for debtors and bad for creditors.

Anyway, I'm hardly opposed to keeping inflation low. I would be fine with 0 inflation, for that matter. By 0 inflation, I don't mean a fixed money supply. I mean $X pays for about the same amount of goods 10 years from now as it does today.

Accepting limitless deflation via a fixed monetary supply is just as absurd as accepting limitless inflation.

It does not make sense to base a monetary system on a token that represents "1/k of all the wealth", where k is a constant. So just by stuffing the token under your mattress, contributing to zero economic activity, you reap the rewards of all economic growth that added wealth to the world.

Here's how I see it:

The US M2 money supply grew from $286B in 1959 to $19,670B in 2021.

With that came inflation: a dollar in 1959 could buy roughly what $9.13 buys today, according to the BLS.

But that level of inflation is not even close to 1:1 with the money supply increase.

The money supply grew to almost 69x its 1959 size, but the dollar is worth 1/9th what it used to be, not 1/69th. That's because the whole pile of dollars put together are representing more real world wealth than existed back then. The economy has grown, more people are participating in it, and it's making more stuff people value.

Maybe the correct level of growth in the money supply would've been 9x smaller, for no inflation. So the dollar today would buy roughly what it did back in 1959. I suppose that would be OK. But that's still a money supply increase from $286B to $2,193B.

What if the money supply was fixed? So instead of roughly 9.1x inflation, we'd have roughly 7.7x deflation: the dollar today would buy 7.7x the stuff it bought back in 1959. How is that fair? Grandpa's pay for a day's work back in '59, which he put in a safe and forgot about, is worth what I get for a week and a half of work in 2021? Talk about oppressing the poor, you're never going to beat "old money" in this system. The longer the family has been wealthy the more unattainable their savings will be in terms of present-day wages and earnings.

And that's all assuming the best case scenario, which is that the 7.7x economic growth still happens with this deflationary currency. I could easily see it being lower given that there's less incentive for anybody to invest in businesses.