Many people think that gold is a good currency because it has intrinsic value. This is almost (not quite) complete nonsense. Nothing has intrinsic value, except for goods and services. The value of a thing is what people are willing to buy and sell it for. If it keeps its value, it's because somebody is willing to pay.
Back in pre-history, people traded things with each other. This is sometimes inconvenient--the buyer may not have what the seller wanted, and a third party, who does have what the seller wanted and also wants what the buyer has, might be necessary. Fairly early on, people figured out that instead of a third party, a third item which had a fairly reliable trade value, because almost everybody found it useful, could increase the possibility of negotiating such trades. Items which could easily be adjusted to fit the value needed were more useful--grain, pieces of cloth, etc. Things which are easy to carry around are also better--and of course the more rare the item, the more valuable it is, which makes it easier to carry around. The reason gold rose to the top of this heap is because it's both rare and very difficult to fake: it's heavier than any more common metal (19.32 gm/ml. Lead is 11.34.) and it's soft and doesn't tarnish. That's it. But that's very useful, and before long, nearly every trader or laborer would happily take gold for their goods or services. Somebody, most likely in ancient Lydia (today, part of western Turkey) figured out how to make standardized coins with a press around 700 BC, which is also about the time the Bible was written, and this idea quickly became universal. Coins made of baser metals were less valuable, both because they were more common than gold, and because they were easier to fake. But they were still convenient. Even then, none of these necessarily maintained their value--inflation happened with gold as with any other currency, although what was happening was not understood until the 15th century.
Some people, including Ron Paul and Lyndon LaRouche and a lot of equally confused people, think that there's something special about gold. There is, but it's only that scarcity and difficulty of forging. Anything else that has a limited supply and is difficult to forge works. Fiat currency--printed money--was invented about a thousand years ago in China. This is very convenient--government can print as much as it needs. But it didn't take long for people to figure out how to fake it. And if government printed too much, inflation got out of hand and destabilized the economy. Central banks were created to manipulate the money supply. Today, most of the world money supply is just numbers in account books or their computer equivalent. The central banks of the world manipulate demand for it and thus the amount in circulation by manipulating interest rates.
Bitcoin is no different: it's just a form of currency that's difficult to fake and the supply is constrained by a technological trick, which impedes the printing of it. The appeal for some people is that because government is not involved, government won't be able to manipulate it. This is true, and it's a bad thing. Since, like coins and printed currency, it's very hard to trace, it's been a boon for criminals looking to hide or launder their transactions. And because it's hard to produce much, if demand skyrockets, its price will skyrocket too.
There are very few cases of the Federal Reserve and other central banks doing things to devaluate our money, in fact quite the reverse: in 1979-81 the fed intentionally drove up interest rates and caused substantial unemployment to stop inflation. Had a sizable part of the economy been out of their control through a mechanism like bitcoin, both inflation and unemployment would have been much higher.
There have been cases of government explicitly devaluating money, e.g. the 1967 devaluation of the British Pound, and there have been lots of cases of incompetent, corrupt governments printing lots of money and causing hyperinflation. But as long as the Federal Reserve is relatively immune from political pressure from economic naïfs like Ron and Rand Paul, and professionally staffed, it's unlikely to do that.
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