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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> People just discover that the 200,000 miles they'd been working towards for years, now no longer even buys the ticket they thought it would.

Being able to continuously arbitrarily devalue them is the whole point of designing a rewards system with “miles” and “points” or whatever non official currency unit.

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The fluctuation of currency is what we expect. Same with points. But isn't a mile always a mile?

> Being able to continuously arbitrarily devalue them is the whole point of designing a rewards system with “miles” and “points” or whatever non official currency unit.

Which is exactly the point of creating the fiat money system in 1914. Have you noticed that the dollar has been continuously devalued ever since?

And no, it wasn't to "stabilize" the monetary system. That is just propaganda.

"The Federal Reserve System therefore began operations with no effectiye legislative criterion for determining the total stock of money. The discretionary judgment of a group of men was inevitably substituted for the quasi-automatic discipline of the gold Standard."

-- Monetary History of the United Stats pg 193

I really don't understand how gold/silver provide any protection beyond paper currency. What's stopping any government from just deciding that instead of two ingots, you owe them three now? They own the scales, they can put their thumb on whatever side they want as hard as they want. If you want to argue with that, you ultimately have a gun pointed at you. It's the same thing with a slightly different set of steps.

Lol back then the US had the gold standard. Currency was backed 1:1 by precious metals.

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