[littlestymaar]

How many people are buying pizzas in bitcoin nowadays? That's what you get when a currency is deflationary: everyone hoards it. (For bitcoin it's not a big deal, when it was Reichmarks we got the worse economic crisis of the continent and questionable people reaching power…)

[Geisterde]

Are you asking how much money is transacted on the bitcoin network every day? Have you heard about the treaty of Versailles? You think it was a shortage of Reichsmark's?

Are you serious?

[littlestymaar]

> Are you asking how much money is transacted on the bitcoin network every day?

No I'm talking about the amount of bitcoin that's being used for actually buying things, like what money is doing.

> Have you heard about the treaty of Versailles?

The rise of Hitler is as related to the Treaty of Versailles as it is related to the Jews having backstabbed Germany: absolutely not except that it was part of the Nazis' populist discourse [0].

> You think it was a shortage of Reichsmarks?

In 1930-1933 definitely, and it's a well documented[1] fact that the memory of the hyperinflation of the decade before pushed the government to a destructive deflationary monetary and fiscal policy that cause way more economic damage than in neighboring countries and led the Nazis to power.

[0] the US Congress not having ratified the treaty, and the influence of Keynes book *The economic consequences of peace” in the UK made the treaty kind of moot anyway, as Germany really never really respected it in the first place (especially, they weren't paying what the treaty said they should) and France alone had little leverage to enforce it.

[1] see for instance:

- https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/its-always-1923...

- https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/10/19/debunking-...

But there really a lot of resources out there talking about Brüning's deflationary policy.

[Geisterde]

>like what money is doing

Currency isnt money. Your money, believe it or not, is gold. In 1971 the gold window closed, the price (of this gold) is controlled centrally, its supply is relatively unknown, but the global banking standard was formed under the gold standard, and a few policies were enacted to abstract the dollar away from the gold underneath. Today, governments and banks do a lot to obfuscate this fact, but it is evidenced in the fact that currency cannot be created without a corresponding debt. This is fiduciary credit, implicitly not explicity backed, and created in quantities that are politically acceptable.

The deflation you speak of is the natural consequence of this system. It is inherently unstable; dollars are created when a loan is issued, that loan must eventually be repaid with interest, but there was only ever enough currency to repay the principle. The only way to keep any amount of currency in circulation is to take on more debt, and that requires willing buyers who are continuously devalued, but if you dont then of course everything collapses, only thing is, you cant compare that to gold or bitcoin.

When times turn sour and people hold their money, you see interest rates rise, unprofitable ventures get washed out of the market. Those companies capital goods return to market creating opportunities for profitable companies. As conditions stabalize around companies that pull their own weight, rates go down and new ventures form. Not so with fiat, when conditions go bad and people save money, the blast radius is everyone with debt, for which there is not enough currency to pay, and cascading defaults emerge as an existential threat to the economy.

I liken it to playing with explosives. Whatever you think you gain by cheap credit, I would point to the disastrous effects of WWI, the prolonging of the great depression, the housing bubble of 2008, and the overall inflation of the last few years. There is far more, but in terms of major events its easy to point to these as examples of how much damage fiat causes.

[littlestymaar]

> Your money, believe it or not, is gold

Ahahahha.

Let me teach you something: you know this interesting factoid that everything that you've know as a child appears to be obvious whereas everything that comes after is regarded as being somewhat unnatural (in good or in bad though)?

Well that's exactly how this idea of gold being the money was born: gold as the money standard is a pretty recent idea, it only took of in the late 19th century[0], when bimetallism (gold + silver, which had been ubiquitous for hundreds of years[1]) died because of the massive improvement in silver extraction capacity (thanks industrial revolution, yet another good ol' thing you destroyed!). But lots of folks grew up during the short period of time where the gold standard had existed, and then it appeared to some of them that “money equals gold” was obvious and everything that came after was bad.

But the truth is, money is whatever people use to pay stuff, although it's better if it can be stored in some fashion for a certain time without losing all value (that's why overinflation is bad, even though people routinely live fine with low double digit inflation).

(Also, everything else I read from your comment is QAnnon-level of “dude WTF”… I quited reading after too many yikes, sorry)

If you really want to learn stuff about money, free from contemporary ideologies, you should go read Allynn Young, he's from a century ago and he talks brilliantly about the history of money in the US before the Fed was created. And, spoiler alert, it's not the kind of “rosy sound money” fantasy: it was a bloody mess.

But you can also keep parroting conspiracy theories if that's your thing, who am I to judge.

[0]: though most money was debt-based fiat already, but at least there was some kind of pegging.

[1]: even then, the metal itself was only really used for international trade, for domestic trade the face value was commonly used, and debasement was routine)