Yeah it's a tricky one. It seems obvious that "digital money" is going to be very useful in a lot of ways, and in the future is almost certain to appear.
There was a very brief period when bitcoin might have been the start of such a thing. When companies were adding support for it, and people were spending 200+ bitcoin on pizza, actually doing useful things like transferring money internationally, etc.
But these days? It's all speculation, gambling, and HODLing to the moon.
Maybe in the future we'll have a cryptocurrency which is actually usable as a currency, spent, and being in circulation, not being mined and hoarded by people who expect 1000000% returns.
This. Bitcoin is essentially the USD + US stock market in 1922. Hard money and unregulated securities markets already broke the world once. The crypto wizards somehow managed to forget a century of hard won lessons.
It was hardly "hard money" in 1922, as the Fed was created in 1913, and the dollar started plummeting. If you want to see what a hard money world looks like, look at the 40 years or so prior to 1913, when most civilized nations were on a gold standard.
We have constant booms and busts now, even though we have more liquidity, people who should know better, math to describe what's going on, 'tools' to try to prevent it...
But the gold standard has its own issues. The gold standard is effectively a system of pegging all participating currencies to one another.
A dollar is X milli-ounces of gold, a Pound Stirling is Y milli-ounces.
They are effectively pegged at an X:Y ratio. But currency pegging has issues in practice, with Governments only able to keep it stable within certain limits. Outside those limits bad things will happen if you don't update the peg ratio. But when using a gold standard, if you have to adjust how much gold your unit of currency is worth, it makes people upset. If you make a dollar worth less gold people with dollars get quite upset. Also if people expect such a redenomination will be occuring, it can cause on run on the gold reserves.
Meanwhile, if you make a dollar worth more gold, you piss off anybody holding gold.
The changing of the ratio is even worse if you are using precious metal coinage that have the specified amount of gold (or silver, for the silver-standard) in them. If the ratio needs to change, now you have all this money with a face value, precious metal content mismatch.
And all this is on top of the fact by using the gold standard, the rate of gold mining can heavily impact the economy.
You mean a half century of closing the wealth gap (while healing from the labor disruption of freeing the slaves), and somehow still managing to go from being a war torn country to world superpower?
Even the ones with disinflationary supply suffer from a large wealth concentration as they distribute all or the majority of supply in just the first few years.
If the population doubles, and the 100 dollars remains fixed, the value of the dollar has increased.
If more dollars are not printed to maintain some inflation, people will slow spending hoping for 300 people the next year.
Now, in the case of BTC, it’s not global population that matters, but the population of interested users, which could go from 10,000 to 100,000,000 in months. If BTC can’t be mined fast enough to maintain a balance of coins/users as interest skyrockets, it is, by definition, deflationary.
Why would people slow spending due to a fixed money supply? The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want. Conversely in in an inflating currency scenario yes I might spend the money sooner than I would otherwise, but then in the future I won't be able to spend it again, why is it so much better that I buy today instead of tomorrow?
I have heard the argument that deflation is just an unthinkable disaster for my entire life but I'm not convinced, rather it seems like a convenient excuse for countries to print their way out of budgetary problems.
> The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want.
That's the key. With a deflationary currency you want to keep the money, but need to buy goods. With an inflationary currency you want to buy the goods, so you only keep as much money as you need. This means that an inflationary market has shorter dependency chains, less disruptions (because value is more easily predictable) and generally runs more efficiently. Deflationary value incentivizes consuming less; inflationary value incentivizes consuming more. This is why economies grow and produce more value.
Of course this can be overdone by having an inflation that's so fast that deep production chains become impossible to manage, so you generally want inflation that's low enough that investment-based value gain is not affected, but high enough that money is not a viable investment vehicle.
Remember that money is what you have instead of something useful.
edit: For instance, if you have hyperinflation, you cannot buy a fabrication machine for your factory, because the monetary value of the machine grows faster than your ability to save money. The best use of money is always consumptively spending it immediately. This is also inefficient. So you want to balance between those two problems.
> The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want.
This might be true for food, but a lot of our economy is based on investments and things we don't strictly need. Why would I give money to a startup if I can simply leave it on my bank account and have a guaranteed return?
> Conversely in in an inflating currency scenario yes I might spend the money sooner than I would otherwise, but then in the future I won't be able to spend it again, why is it so much better that I buy today instead of tomorrow?
Because it keeps the money in circulation. You might spend the money, but that money then gets to a business. This business also doesn't want money lying around, so they might, for example, build something. Which gives the money to a building company. Which then gives the money back to the worker. That's a lot of movement and value creation. Also, you really want to spend or invest the money sooner, since you won't get as much for your money if you buy something tomorrow instead. With deflation, this whole reasoning is reversed - why would you spend any more money than necessary, if you can buy much more with it tomorrow? You wouldn't and this kills the economy.
To me the issue is the supply of tokens is not correlated to the actual underlying supply of goods and services in the economy. Tokens should be minted/burned according to the fundumentals of the underlying economy. Hard to do with a single digital currency as there is a whole economy. But viable with ERC-20's, which can be turned into micro-currencies. The great thing about ERC20 tokens, is you can swap them pretty effortlessly. And on a chain like Avalanche, it's cheap and scalable.
The only thing it's useful for is financial crime though - if your problem is just making a payment you can do it in dollars relatively easily and safely.
Payments here in the EU, even between countries, are pretty straightforward.
Transferring money from the EU to UK, or EU to USA, Peru, or Canada get more complicated and expensive though. Those are the kind of transfers I had in mind.
There are transferwise, and similar services, but even so it's not as cheap as it should/could be.
The problem of transferring currencies is that you are always buying through currency traders, who are attempting to make a profit on knowing current exchange rates and predicting near and long term exchange rates.
I was visiting Montreal from the US a couple decades ago, and I wanted to exchange some US dollars for Canadian, and in the financial center, I found five different exchanges with five different rates. I had to walk about six blocks total to hit them all, but the difference between the lowest and highest was significant.
The problem that international fund transfers require currency brokerage is not solved by introducing another currency.
Why do you need to convert currency when transferring to someone in another country in the first place? Because the banking infrastructure in that country is denominated in their currency. Because their bank account only permits them to hold balances in that currency. And because only funds in that currency are guaranteed by the banking laws in that country.
If it weren’t for that, currency conversions could be ignored! If everyone in the world had bank accounts that could handle euros, say, you could transfer funds globally; people could make purchases by transferring euros, etc etc.
In fact there’s not a lot stopping you from doing that. You can have an account denominated in whatever currency you like. Provided you don’t care about things like deposit protection.
And that’s all Bitcoin and other crypto really add to the mix - a uniformly available currency for denominating non-deposit-protected balances.
