>Satoshi got it extremely wrong, to the point that if he had any economic background at all I’d suspect the first wave of crypto currencies to be a sick joke
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>coming off [the Gold Standard] heralded the greatest period of economic growth in Western history.
You got this extremely wrong, to the point that if you had any economic background at all I'd suspect your comment to be a sick joke. The US saw average growth rates of over 4% in the 19th century as it industrialised. By the time the Gold Standard was abandoned, most of the west was already thoroughly "developed", and could not grow as fast as before due to there being fewer lower-hanging fruit. This is the same reason places like China and India see growth rates of 6-8% in recent years (compared to 2-3% in the west): there are many more low-hanging fruit in a developing economy (e.g. moving the 50%+ of the population engaged in subsistence farming into more productive factory or service work).
As an aside, such language is unbecoming of anyone who wishes economics to be considered a real science. Even in physics, where it's possible to craft exact, repeatable experiments that can prove a statement true with 99.999% accuracy, practitioners still try to avoid bombast and smuggery because of how easy it is to make mistakes. Yet in economics, a field where it's difficult to even repeat the same experiment twice, and no model can predict the future anywhere near as accurately as a simple model such as Newton's laws can in physics, many practitioners seem quite comfortable making grandiose, bombastic and mocking statements with complete confidence in their own correctness. To me this smells like a consequence of economists never having been exposed to the humbling experience of having to validate their models' predictions against the real world, and not being held accountable for bad predictions.