But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in gold.
Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in gold, they have plunged; the gold economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.
And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the gold rather than spending it."
I'm willing to stomach lots of negatives to take away the government's power to inflate to pay for war. Historically inflation has always been for war.