190 years ago today - to the day - in the US Senate:

Senators Wiliam Rives and Isaac Hill state in their speeches:

W.R.:

Nothing, in my opinion, is more demonstrable than the great evil of that system, its ruinous fluctuations arising from alternate expansions and contractions of bank issues, makin a lottery, in efect, of privat fortunes, and converting all prospective contracts and transactions into a species of gambling, ...

... in preserving the soundness of currency, that object would be much more effectualy promoted by a return ... to a metallic currency.

his roadmap:

- destroying the BUS (2nd bank of the US) - her notes withdrawn,

- gold coins fill the gap,

- suppress small denomination notes,

- gold and silver flooding the country as a reaction of the market,

- government will be able then to demand payments in specie,

- safe return of the country to a hard money system.

I.H.:

any system of currency, that has not hard money for its basis, must fail.

paper money could never serve as a viable, long term currency.

fluctuations and panics ... would be eliminated by a return to hard money.

opponents in the Senate, in the person of Senator Thomas Ewing, put forward the main argument against these ideas:

he conjured up images of merchants traveling accompanied by an escort of armed guards to protect wagons packed with gold coins. the merchant, the mechanic, the laborer would laugh at the idea of a returning to a hard currency. ... a currency, which would be inconvenient and would not answer the necessities of business.

jan. 20, 1834

Register of Debates, 23rd Cong., 1st sess.

I can see the unborn elephant in the plenary hall, even without a sci-fi TV broadcast ...

Even if 190 years have obviously not changed much for the better, at least this argument (inconvenient) is obsolete with Bitcoin.