Gold's physical characteristics tended towards centralization. Centralizing gave the institutions controlling the gold strong incentives to allow debasement of gold-backed money, as it gave those institutions handsome profits and strong political control.

History has repeated shown us that printing money in a crisis just makes it worse, eventually. Taking that away is hard, but honesty is the best policy, even if it hurts at first.

The reason we ditched the gold standard was for deviance. It’s very hard to fight wars if you can’t print the money. Ww1 ww2 Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq … try that on gold. Bitcoin = End of all war.

Let a recession happen when we deserve one, so the depressions don't happen.

Holding back the floodgates until the problem is ready to kill everyone equally is stupid, and the opposite of a meritocracy.

Sure, but the ECB or Federal Reserve can print money, and you don't control them. If your goal is a mathematically guaranteed money supply (this would not be my goal, fwiw), BTC is superior.

Because then you're beholden to another country, which may be hostile to your country, and their money printer.

With Bitcoin, no one has control!

El Salvador already uses the US dollar, but it has no control over what the US does to its money supply.

If you are using another country's currency you are tied to their monetary and indirectly fiscal policy which most likely does not align to yours.

In fact trying to get a neutral or deflationary currency is a no brainer. Especially, if you have a small banking system/network.

Of course there are gotchas.

The US dollar was el Salvador's currency. They are trying to diversify away from that total dependence.

As people have pointed out this means that the US or wherever can print money and controls your monetary policy, but that's actually the least of the problems. Euros and US Dollars in large quantities, and digitally transferrable versions of them, can essentially only exist as numbers in databases controlled by the US and EU government respectively. So by adopting them as your country's currency, you're effectively giving them control over your money. They get to decide whether it continues to exist, whether you get to access it, whether it gets transferred to some well-connected megacorporations in those countries that bribed your former leader into a dodgy deal... In short, it gives a whole bunch of control to powerful entities who have tended to use their powers in ways that have not been good for developing countries at all.

Might even call it crypto-fascism lol

What does that even mean? Is there any fiat currency system you can point to where elite insiders don't get special access to the money printer before us plebs do?

Except in bitcoin, having a large share from the past doesn't directly confer control in the present, since it's not a proof of stake system.

If it's actually used as a currency, a person with a large stockpile will gradually lose their relative share over time as they consume, since you don't generate interest on it.

It's also confusing to me that people can hold the cognitive dissonance of defending a post gold standard, infinitely inflatable currency with a negative view income inequality, which only started increasing drastically after we abandoned the gold standard.

An inflationary currency benefits the wealthy asset owners more than the working class almost by design. Asset owners get to borrow against their assets and pay it back in a depreciating currency, while at the same time getting to use a psychological magic trick to make poorly educated employees think they're getting a pay raise, when in real terms they're getting a pay cut.

If I was a greedy rich person who wanted to make sure I could never lose my wealth, I would build a financial system on a currency that inflates away by design.

You could have stopped after "I am not sure what libertarian really means"

> autocracies fund their operations with inflation

There is limited evidence for connecting countries' foreign debt levels to their degree of democratization [1].

More pointedly, there is ample evidence--millenia of it!--for empires on commodity money waging war and whatnot and having a fine time of it.

> deficit spending funded with inflation is not really what people have voted for

Deficit spending / bond issuance is voted on at multiple levels of government practically every cycle. People have voted for this. Because the alternative is austerity, and fanatical governments that pursue that for its own sake tend to get replaced.

[1] https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/68966375/bf00224681202...