Comment by inv13 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inv13 | Hacker News Reader

I am not expert in economics, but form what I see: - Not being able to print money might sound really good first, but this could be the reason COVID haven't done the havoc it would have without that money. Stopping businesses from collapse is crucial, no mater at what cost. Why? You really want your local super market to be totally empty? And scavenge for food? No. We just need a way to be able to prevent it. This is what helped in 2008, and currently trying to help. What this money printing is going to cause, we don't know, but its better than dieing because of not having the ability to intervene when we have to. - We always need some way of policing this society as a whole. We cant really have nice things. There is a reason we have locks, and fences. Wouldn't it be good if we were are just one happy family(I just laughed myself to death saying this)? No crimes, no anything. Everybody just live a happy life without any crime. That would be wonderful. But we all know that is not really what is happening. I feel like that's the fairy tale crypto currency is selling, and that's why it sells really good, as always, we always thrive some easy way to make a living, make money, whatever. And crypto currency checks a lot of boxes we are all want.

Ability to print money can be good and useful, but governments have a long history of going overboard. The benefits of printing money are immediate and tangible and the pain tends to lag and are widely distributed (hurting everyone that holds the currency worldwide).

Fiat currencies definitely have their place, but so do hard assets. And it may turn out to be useful to have a hard asset that is much more easily divisible, transferrable, and more resistant to seizure than gold.

If you're looking to compare Bitcoin to something, it should be the (free banking) gold standard (before the Federal Reserve 'changed' it), which was similarly inflexible. In the era of the gold standard , there were depressions, but they were quite brief (usually a few months); there were no great depressions or great recessions

> In the era of the gold standard, there were no great depressions

Apart from this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

> "The gold standard was the primary transmission mechanism of the Great Depression"

Is your understanding of this only from that line or do you have a more deeper take on it.

Back in 1920s, govt could 'adjust' the gold standard by changing the rate whenever they wanted.

Wanna double the money supply by 60%? Change the gold standard peg from 1.505g to 0.888g of gold.

When you didn't do that, you got a very short lived depression of 1920-1921 [1].

When you did, like FDR did in 1933, you got a long, extended deperession.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_of_1920%E2%80%93192...

> When you did, like FDR did in 1933, you got a long, extended deperession.

But the Great Depression began in late 1929. FDR's decision in 1933 retroactively extended the depression by 3 years?

Great depression didn't end till 1939.

Before that Great Depression, the term 'Great Depression' referred to the 23 years of economic crisis which started in 1873 and ended only when gold was found in the Yukon...

Tying economic growth to the availability of gold was a disaster.

> In the era of the gold standard (before the Federal Reserve 'changed' it), there were depressions, but they were quite brief (usually a few months); there were no great depressions or great recessions

You mean The Great Depression of 1929 wasn’t a great depression?

The Federal Reserve really changed the game; I am talking about the free banking era.

Before the establishment of the Fed in 1913, you had the Panic of 1893, which caused a depression until ~1897; before that the Depression of 1882-1885; and before that the Long Depression of 1873 to ~1878.

All of those times also overlap with the so-called 'gilded age' when "rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force.[56] Real wages (adjusting for inflation) rose steadily, with the exact percentage increase depending on the dates and the specific work force."

There were definitely issues, but nothing like the Great Depression of the 1930s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Economic_growth

The 1920s-1960s were also, taken as a whole, a time of enormous economic growth!

You can argue that recessions of the 19th century are okay because other growth balances them out.

You can argue that recessions of the 20th century are bad because of their immediate consequences.

You cannot argue both.

I use the example of forest fires. Small forest fires keep large forest fires at bay. But if you prevent small forest fires then it just leads to large forest fires.

System's problems were regularly removed from the economy when we were on Gold standard (like run on the banks etc). Then Federal reserve gets a hold and they start putting out these 'small fires' and it just leads to large uncontrollable depressions.

There are more ways to give food to citizens in an emergency than printing trillions of dollars. There are more ways for the government to acquire money than conjuring it out of thin air. There are more ways to prevent local businesses collapsing than inflating the stock market.

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