Gold failed as money because the government made it illegal to hold. It had nothing to do with how much gold there was (or how much could be confirmed) in the world. It had to do with the fact that they wanted to print money and needed people to use the money they were printing.
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Gold failed because as hard money because it’s not easy verifiable. Not being 100% certain about the total supply and the supply in your vault. Exactly the same with monero.
That’s why it won’t work. Open distributed ledger wins
It's funny it took thousands of years, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and legislation making it illegal to use to convince people of this :smirk:
Gold is still the second best. But it’s not the perfect fit in a digital world.
Actually gold failed because it can’t be transported well. That’s the main reason fiat outcompeted it, the others are secondary
With regards to the unverifiable supply, we believe that’s a major negative of Monero.
It makes no sense to trade off an unverifiable supply for privacy on the base layer.
It is better to build privacy on a second layer - regulations allowing.
If Bitcoin was private by default on layer one, it’s adoption would be a much bigger hurdle and much less of a given. It’s not very free market, not very libertarian, etc - but it is the world we live in
Good arguments brother 🫂
I guess it depends on who we want adopting it. If we want regulators, advertisers, auditors, and global financial manipulators interested, sure making an open ledger is a great idea. If we just want to trade privately amongst ourselves I don't see why it needs to be publicly readable.
You verify both Bitcoin and Monero supply in the same fashion - by running a node. Monero is more complex math, but math nonetheless.
But in practice, verifying is exactly the same. Why? Because no bitcoiner is manually tallying all UTXOs every time they audit to make sure it is correct. They just run a node.
Right that's basically the whole point of the concept of code is law which applies to xmr as much as bitcoin.
Gold didn't fail because of it's difficulty in transport. That's a cope. It was banned by bankers who wanted to control the money supply. They took everyone's gold under threat of imprisonment. It was used for thousands of years prior to that, and the transporation technology has only improved over the centuries.
My point was simply that the verifiability of the world supply isn't what ended it's reign as a currency. some 40 or 50 years where it was illegal to hold let the generations who were famliar with using it as a currency die off. In the meantime people were conditioned to believe that paper held similar value (once upon a time it did).
and the core reason for paper existence and proliferation was the difficulty and risk in transporting gold
World War 2 was the major reason. There is a book that talks about the flow of gold during the war - it is a massive logistical headache and risk
I don't have a problem with "paper" per se. I have a problem with a currency that is based entirely on debt. The Fed was born in 1918. WWII didn't start until 1939. Gold was outlawed in 1933 "in order to prevent the export, hoarding, or earmarking of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency" not because it was difficult and risky to transport.
> on April 5, 1933, one month after taking office, Roosevelt used the powers granted to the president by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to make gold ownership illegal. He issued Executive Order 6102, which made gold ownership--both in coins and in bars--illegal for all Americans and punishable by up to ten years in prison. Anyone caught with gold would also have to pay a fine of twice the amount of gold that was not turned over to the Federal Reserve in exchange for paper money.
You *could* argue that WWII was a money printing bonanza and the first test of the new system put in place in 33, but it decades after the Federal Reserve was born.
> Open distributed ledger wins
Klaus is that you?