[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Also you‘re taking one feature „they had a gold standard back then“ and take it as the single point failure. In reality having a „Gold Standard“ does not guarantee a non-inflating currency. In the 1920s the FED was printing more dollars than were backed by gold to pay back the government’s war time debts. The same happened in the losing nations like e.g. Germany, too, in a much greater force causing a death spiral completely destroying the German Reichsmark. In the US you were lucky to just experience a stock market boom that spectacularly burst in 1929. This would have caused a recession for sure. However, the decade long depression that actually followed was a result of unprecedented economic meddling by the federal government under Hoover and then Roosevelt.
The Gold Standard was removed after the „Bretton-Woods“ system broke down in 1971. That was an attempt at establishing an international currency system with fixed exchange rates. It worked in a pyramidal fashion: The US promised to have their Dollars backed by gold and the middle power nations‘ central banks backed their currencies with US dollars. Of course, the US printed more dollars than they actually could back by their gold reserves. At some point France demanded to redeem their dollar reserves in Gold. The US did not comply and in 1971 Nixon declared the Dollar not being redeemable into Gold any more because the FED didn’t have enough gold left. Since then the US dollar as well as all international currencies are backed only by the people’s trust in them and by the fact you have to pay your taxes in those currencies.
So you see the monetary history is primarily a history of failure induced by bad economic policies. How currencies were implemented is just of secondary interest.
Bitcoin could easily serve as an international currency compared to the US dollar. Its value is based on trust like the US dollar. Governments could collect their taxes in the form of bitcoin if their wanted to without a major systemic change. And unlike the Dollar or Euro, Bitcoin couldn’t be inflated. Whether that will happen and change economy for the better is still left to be seen.
One of those recessions (the panic of 1857) was one of the main contributing factors to the American Civil War breaking out, which hardly seems ‘minuscule’.
> The North was willing to leave slavery in the hands of the States.
The South was unwilling to accept that the North didn't recognise slavery in its territory.
Southerners wanted slavery to be recognised and enforced throughout the US.
> I thought one of the main points of tension was the refusal of Northern states to recognize slaves that fled to the North as "property" and "return them to their owners".
That was the official line — and rather obviously against the concept of states' rights.
But for my money the main issue for the "gentlefolks" was that they couldn't bear not being waited on hand and foot by their slave retinues while enjoying the trapping of the north: they had to pick between those trappings and having an enslaved retinue, as any slave they brought up north was a jump and skip away from freedom.
And they really couldn't handle the "inconvenience" and "degradation".
This is completely wrong. The crash of 1873 began what historians call a 20-year depression. The Panic of 1893 was so serious that when Grover Cleveland needed oral surgery for cancer it was done in secret to avoid further panicking the country. J. P. Morgan basically bailed out the entire US economy in the Panic of 1907.
In all of these cases, labor unrest from the unemployed far exceeded anything seen in any post-WW2 economic crisis in the US. At multiple times the US treasury faced the prospect of being unable to fully redeem demands for gold in exchange for paper money. For the entirety of the Gilded Age, the two main political issues in the US were protectionism and free silver, both fundamentally tied into how the US economy functioned and how the US government paid for itself.
That says more about the size of the US economy at that time than about the size of the economic crisis…
Are you honestly comparing the Asian crisis with what happened in the US 120 years ago?
> This is completely wrong. The crash of 1873 began what historians call a 20-year depression.
Well, just a couple of years earlier the US was in the middle of a bloody civil war that was financed with monetary inflation. That is to blame the post war depression. Not the Gold Standard per se.
You are also conviently evading my main argument that the „Gold Standard“ is irrelevant to the discussion about Bitcoins inherent design. Bitcoin does not implement a Gold Standard even if it is called „digital gold“. It is a machinery designed to prevent human meddling with a monetary base. Something that the Gold Standard was better than today‘s fiat money. But of course it was still far from perfect and depended on the honesty of politicians and bankers.
So — forget about the Gold Standard. It will never come back. The promise of Bitcoin is to bring a monetary system politicians and bankers cannot manipulate. Whether that’s a good thing or even realistic is a separate discussion.
Never heard of any politician giving up power voluntarely.
And money is the power: no more printing - need to work hard for money.
Not gonna happen.
And the US money supply in the 1920´s was pretty stable as it happens, the 1929 bubble was a lending phenomena.
Optimizing for ever higher economic prosperity has so far had the side-effect of ever higher economic inequality, in no small part because only a small number of people are able to succesfully get rich off of moments of instablity.
Optimising for stability means less homless people on the streets (which is an appaling situation in US which still despite that wants to call itself a first world country) because a larger part of society can plan their futures and actually have those plans come true. This also necessary includes socialised healthcare and schooling, for the same reasons (which again probably won't happen in the US for the forseeable future).
Historically speaking, each time we climb out of a recession over the last 50 years it's been a bit slower of a climb than the previous climb out. That is a worrisome trend in its own right. I believe that's the kind of bad you feel people are experiencing -- a barely perceptible improvement starting from a bad situation.