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Comment by walnutclosefarm | Hacker News Reader

> Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply.

You may dislike the way central banks control and manipulate the money supply, but the reality is that an unmanaged currency is generally a disaster for everyone. To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed. The notion that an inherently deflationary unit of accounting (such as Bitcoin), or a completely unmanaged one, or one subject to "management" only through crowd action (as in true Defi) can achieve this is delusional.

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The hard money standard (e.g. precious metals) is older and has outlived nearly all fiat currencies and will likely outlive the existing currencies.

What do you think will be worth more in 100 years from now? 1 US dollar or the equivalent of gold? How about 500 years? 1000 years? My money is on the gold.

Every fiat will be stable until it blows up. It will necessarily be mismanaged in a long enough time line, and based on history it really isn't that long.

I really don't get this line of thought. There's nothing "special" about precious metals in this regard and they only have value as long as people agree they have value. If we found an asteroid rich in gold and managed to capture it, would gold still hold its value? How is gold different than other rare earth metals with a (currently) limited exploitable supply like neodymium?

The only limits on the gold supply are technological ones. If one takes an optimistic view of the future where we become a space-faring species the future supply of gold is effectively unlimited.

Edit: As much as I'm a huge crypto detractor, at least Bitcoin's supply is limited mathematically, not just circumstantially. I would argue this is a bad thing, but if you're looking for something that will hold its value due to scarcity a durable commodity we dig out of the ground seems like a bad long-term bet. What if we discover a massive gold deposit?

> The only limits on the gold supply are technological ones

Right, there's nothing special about it besides the technical limitations. But what's the alternative? With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market). But there's also the political risk. Someone can get power at the Fed and decide to double the money supply over night. In fact, this has happened time and time again with many fiat currencies so its not exactly an unfounded risk. That's why the precious metal standard is lower risk for arbitrary manipulation

> With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market).

I think there is more than technological limitations to making this happen. Not only is counterfeiting considered a major crime by the state (who has a monopoly on violence), but the amount of "money" in circulation that has a physical representation is dwarfed by "money" that does not. Even if you doubled the physical currency in circulation you'd only increase the "monetary supply" by 10% or so. Plus there are huge logistics issues with moving that much weight/volume without getting caught.

> Someone can get power at the Fed and decide to double the money supply over night.

I think that if the function of government breaks down to this extent, I will have bigger problems than currency devaluation.

> I think that if the function of government breaks down to this extent, I will have bigger problems than currency devaluation.

I don't know how to tell you this but...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Currencies are not for hodling. You're supposed to spend them in the same year you get them, not compare their values to assets after 100 years. Their job is not to appreciate but to facilitate efficient commerce in civil societies.

Not sure why I should care what Gold, or anything, will be worth in 100 years, let alone 500 years. Economies turn over money supplies on time scales of a year or two, not centuries. Individuals and business need stability over planning cycles that run from years to a few decades at most.

And it's not like precious metal based currencies were stable over long periods anyway. There is nothing in the working of economies that guarantees that precious metals will accumulate in sync with economic growth and contraction. Trying to tie one to the other is every bit as much "fiat" economics as an untethered currency, like the dollar.

> To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed.

But they don’t optimize for “stable store of value” over “full employment” or “hidden taxation through monetary inflation”.

In fact, they have the opposite goal because “the velocity of money” is negatively influenced by people using money as a store of value. Keeping money in a savings account and collecting interest is bad for society because reasons.

Managing to a limited inflation that is close to the actual growth in the economy supporting a fiat currency, is managing the currency so that it represents a stable store of value. Managing for full employment is probably a cofactor in stability, although a less direct corollary than managing inflation.

I recall looking into plans from the 1970s to peg all central bank currencies into a 'basket of currencies' to avoid things like currency collapse. It would require international goodwill and cooperation, and would eliminate a lot of currency speculation games, so it was kiboshed. Basically it was a mechanism to eliminate volatility and to stabilize the global monetary system. Maybe someone else knows more about it.

This was called Bancor and was proposed by John Maynard Keynes at Breton Woods. It was the major idea competing against the US pushing the dollar as the core of the monetary system and the US had all of the power at the time so that's why we're stuck with the USD now. It's actually a pretty interesting story and Planet Money covered it.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/526051566

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