Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
> ...
> I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
It "solved" inflation by being deflationary (and then you have the massive volatility layered on top of that).
I think it's probably impossible to have a stable currency without some kind of dynamic governance, like a central bank.
( Eg: Collapse of the Spanish Empire )
Yes. That's exactly my claim. Without instruments to support growth, the pre-industrial economy did not grow.
The European Industrial Revolution was kick-started by looted gold and other precious materials (like spices) that were looted from the colonies. It provided unexpected inflation by physically increasing the amount of available currency.
> I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
If you are bringing up 6000 years of stagnation, then our current economic growth is nothing but an outlier.
> small outliers that don't matter.
The Spanish Empire that spanned a globe and had a footprint in North America only recently eclipsed by the modern USofA is a "small outlier" ?
Uh-huh.
I assume that you're just completely ignorant, and as such, you can't be educated.
> Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system
We didn't.
> and no record of deflation in the history of mankind.
Germany, 1932-1933. US, 1927-1933. And so on.
See also: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971?
The economic systems have not been based on precious metals for quite a while. There simply has not been enough gold (or silver) to back up the economy for at least 200-300 years. Instead, the global economy was based on the _promise_ of getting gold.
In other words, fiat money.
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.