| > 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. |
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.