The failing of the gold standard was that it never limited money in circulation. Gold standards in practically all economies allowed for unlimited amounts of money to be printed at the whim of the central banks. Just that the central banks had to guarantee to pay out the set value in gold (or sometimes silver). At some point ppl realized that there wasn't enough gold in the vaults, which is why trust in the value of money (which is the actual backing force) vanished and hyperinflation happened.
So the gold standard failed because it was bound to fail. It was bound on the false illusion that every penny in circulation was backed up by a gold brick, which it wasn't.
It seems like what you and sibling (hef19898) are calling "failing of the gold standard", others would already call "abolishment of the gold standard". So it's a question of what perspective you take on the question whether it's still a "gold standard" if it has already been departed from. At the very least, if a fixed ratio of coin:gold were actually maintained these failings wouldn't have happened (almost by definition). Whether that is actually achievable in practical politics is of course another question.
> At the very least, if a fixed ratio of coin:gold were actually maintained these failings wouldn't have happened
It could still have happened, the mechanism is basically the same as in a bank run. If there isn't enough gold and too much demand for gold payouts, the central bank will run out and the system will explode.
The "other" "abolishment of the gold standard" is actually something different: The transition from commodity money to fiat money. Commodity money is when your money is something of intrinsic value such as gold. Stamping coins in commodity money only serves to assure the holder of weight and purity, but the value of a coin is 1:1 the metal value. In commodity money, it is pointless to mint any coins out of metals other than the precious ones, so that transition is marked by the abolition of actual gold coins. There you transit from intrinsic value to putative ("fiat" means "believe" in latin) value, usually through instilling some kind of trust into that coin by payout guarantees (you may still get some gold if you really want), force of law and guarantees of purchase power (a loaf of bread will always cost some fixed amout, or else...) or just plain trust that it will continue to work as it always has (which is the current state of things). So the actual abolishment of the gold standard was quite some time after the commodity to fiat money transition and just exchanged the "fiat base" of a promised gold payout by plain trust.
However, that "plain trust" can only work if the amount of money in circulation doesn't increase too rapidly compared to the amount of goods and services available and provided. Which is why you really really need strict control of the amount of money in circulation, thus central bank interest rates, austerity and other limitations on "printing" of money.
The gold standard was, partially, abondonned due to the Vietnam War in 1971. German hyper ibflation, read up on it, it was hilariously bad, happened in the 1920s.
So, inflation under the gold standard was even worse than under fiat at times.
100 million baht in 2 years? So about $1.5m USD in a year.
That's not exactly "staggering" or significant in the context of the Bitcoin network. Unlikely that such operations have any meaningful control over the network or liquidity, even if it's just 1% of what's known.
You seem to think that these sorts of operations are somehow connected in a large coordinated cartel the controls the industry, but given that they're illegal, isn't it far more likely that these "black market" operators are fairly small by comparison to the legitimate players in the US?
The mining ban in China a couple of years back gave us a pretty good indication of the size of the legitimate industry in that country, and it absolutely DWARFS the biggest of the illegal examples you gave.
Interesting way to word it too, "illegal mining". They're just stealing electricity. If they used that stolen electricity for heating, you wouldn't call it "illegal heating", would you?
So you read the article, as well as the quote that I put above and therefore you know that this is estimated to be only 1% of the illegal mining done in _Thailand_ alone, and this in just the past couple of years when visibility of cryptocurrency has been well established even in non-tech circles.
It's been happening ever since crypto mining, especially Bitcoin, existed. Long before most anyone knew what mining was, or knew to look for it being done stealrhily on someone elses's dollar ...or baht. I didn't say I condone stealing electricity for any purpose, but there's a particular hypocrisy with crypto people who claim that mining costs chase the hash rate and difficulty adjustments ensure that everyone has a fair shot at winning a coin base. Obvious nonsense.
It's hypocrisy that crypto people, who like to think of themselves as some sort of sophisticated financial visiinary class, are so hopelessly naive that it would never even occur to them to consider that being rationally self interested will inevitably and swiftly devolve into outright theft, and the obfuscated consolidation of power favors the venal corrupt and those who are willing to benefit from wholesale theft, which is why such people are entrenched at the center of this so-called decentralized system.
this logic would apply to literally every facet of human existence if it were true; your argument has devolved into "people would make more money if they were engaged in criminality and didn't get caught, therefore everyone eventually devolves into a criminal."
the papers studying the amount of black market activity in Bitcoin have consistently shown Bitcoin to be cleaner than the economies in virtually every country on the planet, except for the occasional ultra-clean tiny european state.
literally every bitcoiner since the first roll-out of the Silk Road and the resulting senatorial attacks on them, have been ultra-interested in exactly how much of their hobby is black market and how much is criminality. literally every single one of them is heavily invested in knowing more about the nature and extent of bitcoin criminality. to say that it didn't occur to them that self-interested criminals are operating in BitcoinLand is .. stupid.
> Each coin has its own ins and outs, there isn't one that is the best. They have their own time and place.
This is just wishy washy rubbish trying to appear "diplomatic" and "balanced". Oh sure, you can mint some monkey jpegs or construct a needlessly complex and public smart contract for some esoteric "use case", but the truth is the majority of people in the world don't want or need those things.
People just want a money that works. You can send or receive it instantly across international borders, that no one can stop, and it doesn't lose it's value over the years.
Bitcoin is the only game in town, the "crypto bros" just don't realise it yet because they can make obscene amounts of money from pump and dump schemes with flashy marketing about "use cases" and "yield".
People don't want that. They do want their financial transactions to be stopped and reversed in the event of theft, fraud, merchant error, defective goods, unprovided services, etc. That's why Bitcoin and the other cryptos haven't caught on universally, there's no recourse when something goes wrong. (Really, Bitcoin just defines any redress as out of scope.)
> People just want a money that works. You can send or receive it instantly across international borders, that no one can stop, and it doesn't lose its value over the years.
Pure fantasy.
On cross-border trade that cannot be interdicted: There is no reason for any state to deny itself from sanctioning its adversaries.
On currency valuation: An economic zone has many many actors making independent decisions which in aggregate affects the value of the zone’s currency. The ability to debase a currency by over issuing it is identical to the ability to expand the supply to provide liquidity to a growing economy.
> But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.
Maybe not a rollback, but Ethereum has proven it is malleable time and time again. As one example, compare the issuance of ether to Bitcoin. Eth's issuance is a dog's breakfast, indicative of changing opinions by those who call the shots... just like a central bank.
Bitcoin's issuance? Predictable and steady as a rock for 15 years.
Another example is replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake. A core part of how it works, important for censorship resistance and accessibility, and they removed it for something permissioned that makes censorship far easier.
Bitcoin? Still on PoW and never going to change. If you think it will change, you still don't understand Bitcoin. But never fear, there's already a PoS Bitcoin out there (that no one uses).
I don't know why you're replying to my comment, because I wasn't talking about any of those other issues you've said here. I did not confirm or deny them.
I quoted the single issue that I was disputing. I wrote as clearly as possible to only refute one point, about the implication that Bitcoin had never done a roll back.
If you want to talk about all those other things, then make a separate thread or post,. Please don't use my comment as a vehicle for your arguments, because it's confusing and few people will understand what you're talking about.
* Efficiency - allowing small scale players to participate in verification and block production.
* Inter-chain communication - some networks are explicitly designed as connected swarms of chains (Cosmos and polkadot for example) and some evolving into that direction outside of the protocol level (Ethereum). How do execute transactions that span the networks is an ongoing research topic.
* Privacy - how to execute transactions in private. How to attest that something is true, say that you have a certain credential, without exposing your account information. Blockchain has been why zero knowledge (and now homo-morphic encryption it seems) cryptography are becoming an active field of research.
* Identity, authentication, account recovery. - these tie into cryptography but generally research on applied cryptography with good UX. For example the first time I've seen social-recovery accounts with any amount of usage (now a feature in Apple accounts) was in a blockchain application.
* Monetary research - far from everybody involved in crypto believes that a fixed-supply rare item makes for good money. "Fiat" money is basically a "token" with governance attached to it. This has lead to a wave of experimentation with other forms of tokens - ones that are algorithmically tied to other assets, ones that are backed by an organization, local currencies, etc.
* Organizational research - since smart contracts can effectively be transparent community banks there's has been a plethora of experiments with building organizations that manage their own treasuries. Horizontalism, organizational transparency and cooperation is something that's been at the core of many crypto projects, the idea being that something cannot be both a reliable public good and controlled by a single party. It's not an easy task, but some cool organizations have come out of this. For an example look at pocket: https://messari.io/report/governor-note-proof-of-participati...
Without a general purpose (i.e. Turing complete) and sufficiently expressive programming language (i.e. providing an idiomatic and expressive manner to build general-purpose logic) associated to the ledger you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger. Nor a financial system that inherits those same properties.
If you think about it you are very limited in what you can do. You have an asset that you can self-custody, exchange permissionlessly and without censorship which is good to fight what the original article is about. But you cannot build any financial product on top of it that would have those same properties. Nor be able to scale the transactions per second that the base layer does while keeping those same properties. And I find it very unlikely you can serve the entire world with 7 transactions per second. So yes, there is plenty to innovate on its core function.
> you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger
Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.
The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.
There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.
zk-proofs allow you to do so. It's seeing very active development, and yes it involves an L2. The issue you seemed to have ignored is that to be able for the L2s to inherit those properties from the L1, the L1 needs to have sufficient expressiveness to be able to build the proof verifiers. I would love to see how anyone builds such a thing on bitcoin.
Yikes... digiconomist. Literally zero credibility there. His name is Alex de Vries and he works for the dutch central bank. To my knowledge, very little of his blog posts have made its way to peer review and academic publication. For some reason that doesn't stop his work from being distributed widely as an authoritative source on this topic.
This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because of the incentives it provides around building out renewable energy and mitigating methane emissions.
And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
> This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Like most defenses of bitcoin’s carbon footprint, the paper you linked makes the case that theoretically maybe bitcoin could be carbon negative in the future if certain things happen. If you look at the actual current source of power for miners weighted by hashrate in the US, it’s mostly coal and natural gas. Among companies that don’t have to report this, such as miners in Russia and Kazakstan, it’s likely as bad or worse.
> And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
They have also published a lot of things that have been criticized as being too pro-crypto (such as the Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto).
Was the inflation observed with the gold standard ever as bad as what's seen with government/central bank-issued money i.e. fiat?