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ETF gold is also just paper because it's the promise to deliver upon request - a promise that won't be kept if people actually demanded delivery.
Gov printing money is OK btw if it's in line with the growth of economy. Otherwise, you'd get deflation, which would run economy into the ground. That's also why gold isn't used anymore as basis. Plus that there is only about 20g or so per human in the world. -
You don't really understand inflation. It doesn't happen because if printing. Printing happens because of inflation. Inflation is basically a divergent cobweb system. Pizza price rises, car mechanic starts charging more for work to be able to afford the same amount of pizza. Pizza delivery boy has to pay more to get car fixed, charges more for pizza.
Physical money is issued to fill the growing need of it. It is balanced however. It's not out of thin air.
However, inflation is necessary in a healthy economy. Money has many roles, and just one of them is for storing wealth. The rest are vastly more important.
Investment. There needs to be stimulus for people not to hold on to paper but to real productive assets.
Credit. There is a perfect balance between too much credit (bubble) and too little credit (stagnation). Inflation plays a key role in this process.
I could go on, but the basics is: don't learn economics from Reddit or YouTube. -
As for Bitcoin and other deflation currencies: they're no longer currencies.
If it becomes more practical to store imaginary value, then it's a bubble.
Money is imaginary value. But at least we have good incentives not to hold on to it, but convert it to real value. Which makes it useful and productive.
Bitcoin is where you believe it has value, other people believe that it had value, therefore it has value, but nobody wants to trade it for non-imaginary stuff because its value is believed to grow and you'll have more of it. Why invest in production mediums with 5% return rate when you can buy imaginary stuff that yield 10%? If everyone did that, the economy would be in shambles, and all you're left with is imaginary stuff that is actually worthless now.
Investment that is not a production medium is a bubble. -
@mojo2012 not all cryptocurrencies work like Bitcoin, nor are centralized like Bitcoin. If done properly, the power is in the hands of the people using the currency. And the "energy waste" is negligible compared to the real energy wastes in the world, there are many bigger problems to solve before mining becomes a real issue
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@endor cryptocurrencies have a really high power consumption, and it's growing. The more people get into it, the more energy per transaction is required.
This is not a sustainable system. -
@Root Bingo. Someone said it lmao
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You got it. And this is exactly why Bitcoin failed: it doesn’t inflate. Economies work by the flow of money. Hoarding of funds helps no one. And currencies that encourage hoarding are doomed to fail.
Also I’m not sure that’s technically correct about shares: in order to introduce new shares don’t they have to split the existing ones? -
@Root i strongly disagree. A system like in austria or finland combines the best of both worlds (socialism, capitalism). Peace through public social security (system), regulated markets (but still markets)
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@endor What crypto currency prevent somone to gain too much power (by having enough processing power)?
And no its a huge addinional energy waste, but ur right, we should definitely think about reducing wastage everywhere -
@Root capitalism kills market economy if there are no regulations. You'd end up with monopoly companies, few people having everything and the rest nothing, and then the rich hanging on lamp posts.
There are countries where the government doesn't mix in because it's too weak. "Failed states" is what we call them, and you don't want to live there. -
@Fast-Nop some even go so far calling the US a failed (or failing) state
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@Fast-Nop Capitalism. not corporate croneyism. Corruption and lack of competition are poison to capitalism. Capitalism is not about companies and beating out competition; it's about consumers having options and purchasing power. It is not possible to have these with monopolies, price fixing, "planned economies," etc.
Lit. "Who makes the best reasonably-priced lemonade? I want to buy that." The consumer is happy and the seller is happy.
Regulations are only required insofar as to protect against corruption and monopolies. (Toxic lemonade, false lemonade advertising, lemon/lemonade monopoly, etc.) The system mostly self-regulates beyond that, since e.g. awful or overpriced lemonade generally won't keep selling. -
@mojo2012 I'd ask them to objectively compare the results of their ideal system with the US. We're far from perfect, but we have the largest economy by a huge margin and have produced the majority of the technology despite having only been around for 242 years.
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@Root hmm I can only partly agree. Companies r driven by people are driven by greed. Therefore the people corrupt the system which is the main peoblem of everything mankind invented.
IF companies were demogratic entities it could work but they rnt and therefore the undermine our demogratic society. Regulation can stop that (at least a bit) - theres still curruption in our denogratic government too of course ... -
@Root the US rose bc of world war two where the former leading nations destroyed thenselves (and the economic power they had. The resulting vacuum had to be filled (even when that means destroying legal demogratic governments by force and installing dictators). The only able country were the US.
The same is happening right now btw with china in the pole position.
What is true though is that the US is by far the most significant driver in IT, but that is more based on the fact that other world regions r behind, like western europe overregulating everything, eastern europe fighting with the remnants of the soviet time, let alone other world regions which have way more fundsmental problems to fight with. -
@mojo2012 The US already had a strong economy before that, and its political policies aren't what we're talking about here 😋
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@Root true but GB was pretty close.
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@Root and what u forgot is that the US at that time was mainly driven by its own demand - the size of the country made it possible. The rise of the US and is tenporary world dominance was based on oppression and shameless exploitation (what the europeans did before although with other means)
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@react-guy it is not growing: the amount of computational power available for mining is finite, and if prices don't keep going up it becomes economically inconvenient. It is a self-balancing system.
(Also, the energy is per block, not per transaction) -
@devios1 yep, which is why currencies like Monero have introduced a small tail emission: enough to keep the system alive and offset lost coins, but still a very small inflation to avoid devaluing coins too much (<1% yearly and decreasing).
Also, new coins (the ones introduced by miners) are generated from scratch, not from existing ones. -
@mojo2012 Monero, for instance, has been actively (and successfully) fighting off Asics, in order to let cpu and gpu miners control the network. Overall, the whole ecosystem is far more decentralised, at least for now, and there's no single entity holding significantly more power than any other. There are also may small/solo miners.
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@mojo2012 You can say it's mostly due to exploitation, and perhaps even make a case for it. Factory workers went through hell. Child exploitation also happened. But both happened basically everywhere back then. Both also stopped here in the US quite awhile ago, though they're still pretty common elsewhere. Sweat shops, child labor in factories, ... yet these countries are still not prosperous.
We'll see how temporary the US economy is. With the huge influx of problems Europe is facing, I doubt we'll have much competition from anyone but China, and their economy is only really large because of the sheer number of people.
Also: the US economy being close to Great Britain's at that time is very impressive. GB had the entire British Empire to call on, while the US had only been around for 160some years. -
@Root of course it's exploitation, that's why 5% of the world population consume 25% of its resources - if everyone wanted to live like a US American, we would need 5 earths.
That's the normal imperial wealth pump from the periphery to the centre. Part of the deal is that the US "pay" their bills with the money they print themselves, and countries trying to escape the US$ are in for a rough ride.
First class vassals like Western Europe still come out at around 50% of that, so if everyone wanted to live like a Western European, we would need 2.5 earths. That's how an empire binds its vassals. -
@Root it's not really scientific to compare the USA to the rest of the world. There have been a ton of variables at play here. And you can't just ignore them.
In the early 30s, Stalin recognized that the Czarist Russia has neglected its development and were 100 years behind the industrialized world when bolsheviks came to power.
Krupp was laying one of the largest networks of railroads, towns were paved, electricity was flowing, while most of Russia was struggling with their horses drowning in mud during the spring thaw.
Before them entering WW2, they were a mere 20 years behind.
That gap was breached with an immense effort from .. . human slaves. Yep. Political repressions were done for industrialization. Horrible, I know.
WW2 happened. It took away half of the male population from the USSR and destroyed all of its infrastructure. It gave the USA all of the European scientists who chose to escape somewhere far away from war. -
@Root part 2.
The USA had the biggest influx of Nobel-prize laureates from all of Europe. The USSR could hardly handle its own, with scumbags like Lavrentyi Beria in power.
After war, the economy was in complete shambles. While the US hardly felt it, by comparison. Sure, war bonds, yadda yadda, high tax rates to pay them off, whatever. The USA still had the infrastructure, the factories, the workers. The USA hardly lost any human lives in the conflict, compared to other parties.
And the USSR was dragged into an arms race it couldn't afford. Why dragged? Because Kurtis LeMay had a well known plan to nuke all of USSR's major cities, because he didn't care that it would kill 100 million people. He cared that communists would be done for, together with their atrocities.
Despite Niels Bohr's good advice and warnings, those idiotic politicians started the arms race. To compete, the USSR had to spend as much as the USA, but with broken infrastructure.
OF COURSE THEY LAGGED BEHIND! -
@AndSoWeCode 😂
A communist country lagged behind? Who would have thought!
Of course the laureates, etc left. When their countrymen are fighting mud as a difficult problem, or they are being persecuted for being a member of the wrong religion, or they're barred entry into fields because they're the son of a butcher, or they see very little benefit from their hard work, they're going to leave.
Personal freedoms and an economic system that rewards you for your efforts are huge attractions. -
"This is why you will see non-inflationary assets such as Bitcoin, land, gold bars and gold ETFs, etc. continue to rise in value and certainly outpace inflation."
Bitcoin and gold have essentially zero inherent value, so they are just as useless as repositories of value as any other form of currency. Land admittedly is a finite resource with inherent value, which is probably why it has been the safest form of investment since the concept of land ownership became a thing. This post has college freshman understanding of economics written all over it. -
@catadoxa while gold is essentially useless, people have been appreciating it for millennia to the point of murder and war. It's a pretty safe bet that this will not change in foreseeable future.
Thing is just that there's not enough gold in the world (20g per capita) to make that viable in large scale. Individual investment, however, is another story. -
@Root Russia lagged more BEFORE communism than during it. That was the key point.
Most scientists didn't pursue any religion, and if they did, it was mild, and there was no problem with that. Also important scientists enjoyed a lot of freedoms in the USSR. As such, Pyotr Kapitsa managed to piss off the worst man in the USSR - Beria, and get away with it alive and untortured.
Nobody was barred because of their past. It's the complete opposite. They would've used it as propaganda - like hey, look, we have a classless society where anybody can become anything.
Personal freedoms? Like the one enjoyed by one of the most prominent, strategically important scientists in the USA, Robert Oppenheimer? Being dragged through investigations, smeared, deposed, put aside carefully, for not breaking any single rule? -
@Root and further:
The big reason why the USSR had mud, while the USA had oranges on shop tables (important factor for the biggest leak of USSR intelligence by a defector), is that Hitler chose to attack the USSR on land, and slaughter every single slav that couldn't be used as a slave to work the fertile plains of today's Ukraine. He didn't make it, but the damage he did was catastrophic.
That was no fault of communism, or of the leaders.
You could argue that they could've not conspired with Hitler in the first place, but that wouldn't have played any role in this, would it?
The plain truth, is that the USSR lagged behind because it had to spend a bigger proportion of its GDP on its military and nuclear program just to be able to keep up with the USA militarily, which was, at the time, a question of surviving or not. -
@AndSoWeCode stalin himself killed more/at least as many ukrainians by just starving them!
Ussr failed bc of all the corruption! And the oppression -
@mojo2012 That's not a scientific statement, but a heavily politicized one. I don't deal with politics. I deal with facts. Fact that if I don't know, I spend my time to read 800 page books to find them out.
It's a FACT, well documented, that the USSR failed because it spent too much on its military. It spent less than the US, but the arms race meant either to deal with the expenditure or face destruction.
All of what I state is documented in historical documents and confessions of politicians.
The Ukrainian famine had little to do with anything. It was one of the driest years in history, and Ukraine was the only region in the USSR that produced any food. Everybody knew that. EVERYBODY.
Fun fact: former New York mayor, Laguardia, as director of UNRRA, was denied funding if he provided any help to drought and war-stricken parts of the USSR, because they were commies (source - Dark Sun, by Richard Rhodes). -
@AndSoWeCode no it’s a fact, stalin gave special orders - well documented - to break the ukrainians by starving them. (Book bloodlands)
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@mojo2012 after reading through literature that presents more than one side of the argument, this is what comes out:
1. There is no consensus among historians whether it was a human caused famine or a natural disaster.
2. The Russians claim that there are no documents that could serve as evidence that this was intentional, despite what you wrote. And I tried to search for that order you mentioned, and the stupid search engine kept throwing something completely unrelated - order 227. Otherwise nothing that fits your description. Nor did I find anything more than circumstantial evidence - that Stalin was an asshole and control freak, that he issued a series of orders that greatly aggravated the situation, but all of that seems to be analyzed only from the local view, and not overall.
3. The facts DO point to a natural disaster playing a crucial role in this.
4. The official count is 3.1 million ukrainians dead. However just one camp, Auschwitz, killed 1.1M people. You can't compare -
@mojo2012 and please forgive me. The last thing I wanted here is to make it an oppression olympics or a race of who killed more people.
Let's not forget that it's people we're talking about. I believe this senseless dispute is disrespecting every single victim of those horrible times.
How did the discussion get here from analyzing the economical development of 2 states in 2 completely different environments? This wasn't supposed to be about politics, ever. Just simple economics and a bit of politics-free history to put some context to it. -
@AndSoWeCode you‘r absolutely right and I have no clue😅
A dollar or a peso is a certain amount of work stored in a piece of paper. You need to work to get them or have other people work for you. When governments print new money and push it into circulation they reduce what you were compensated with for the work you did. Essentially they are taking your wealth (spending power) away without you even realizing. It is a modestly sophisticated form of theft. When public companies issue new shares onto the market they are doing same thing by reducing the percentage of the company you own. This is why you will see non-inflationary assets such as Bitcoin, land, gold bars and gold ETFs, etc. continue to rise in value and certainly outpace inflation. It’s because people who are smart with money are fearful of holding cash and they are looking for a safe place to store it. If you are not afraid of holding substantial amounts of cash, then I suppose you don’t really understand what it is. There is a reason why they don’t teach teenagers about inflation in any country of the world. As long as the masses are focused on earning and saving fiat, governments have so much more power and control. If you remove all of the fiat from circulation, then we will revert to a barter/trading system which would substantially reduce government power, at that point they would only maintain control using physical force, which is a lot more challenging to carry out. #btc #gold #rant #av
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