If gold was easily made by "alchemy" or some other way (ie. nuclear transmutation, etc ...), wouldn't increasing the supply of gold just end up driving down its monetary value?
Bitcoin debacle: 850,000 bitcoins gone or half a billions dollars
If gold was easily made by "alchemy" or some other way (ie. nuclear transmutation, etc ...), wouldn't increasing the supply of gold just end up driving down its monetary value?
It would basically become "fiat" money.
So in a "Star Trek" universe, just about every metal/commodity is "fiat", except for dilithium crystals and latinum?
By now (or rather since several months/a year) it is not economical any more to mine bitcoins with consumer hardware and specialized mining hardware has a negative ROI (you will never mine enough coins to break even unless they surge to another new height).
Last edited:
On a gold standard, could deflation also be caused by shenanigans like somebody "cornering" the market for gold (or silver)?
Kramodlog
Naked and living in a barrel
Some people believe that. They are wrong. That has no bearings on bitcoins being a currency.
Kramodlog
Naked and living in a barrel
In theory, but when magic is involved, anything can happen!
Highly unlikely because of the mass of gold and the price increase when you get close to "cornering" the market. Also the increased gold price when the market is getting close to being cornered would negate any economic advantage someone would get from attempting it.
The danger is more that the the circulation is not completely balanced so that the gold slowly accumulates on one side of the circle which, because gold is finite, automatically reduces the available gold on the other side.
An example, the British mainly switched to the gold standard away from silver because they simply did not have enough silver any more. In that time the majority of global silver reserves ended up in China as they sold products for silver, but never bough anything which would have allowed the silver to flow back to the rest of the world.
The same would happen today on a global scale with exporting nations (China, Germany,...) accumulating more and more gold over time while importing nations are slowly drained of their reserves (including the US). Of course that is not only limited to the global scale and can also happen on local markets.
They're so dumb that JP Morgan filed a patent recently on their own crypto-currency.
Sometimes, in situations like this, the only dumb thing is making broad judgement statements about complex things.
Crypto-currency is a technology about securing and managing money transactions.
BitCoin is an implementation.
I already only carry a debit card in my pocket. Anything I buy is paid for by transferring ones and zeroes via transactions that are no doubt encrypted from one account to another.
Once banks offer their own form of money called "credits" that happens to be their version of crypto-currency, it's the same thing but different.
Mt. Gox got hacked to death. The key failing of BitCoin is that the servers involved weren't secure. Apparently less secure than the banks anyway.
I don't know what it'll take for a new currency to take hold. But security is probably the top order of business.
When that day comes, it'll probably be some form of crypto-currency, perhaps an e-translation of our mighty dollar.
At least I won't be on record as saying "crypto-currencies are dumb"
Or that 640K is all the memory a user would ever need.
Similar Threads
Spelljammer
Spelljammer Collector’s Guide Revisited
