The reason gold hasn't skyrocketed in value is precisely because it isn't used as currency any more. Gold is intrinsically valueless - it is not really a useful metal, and usefulness is the real determinant of value. If gold was still used as a currency, the value would be way beyond what it is now. No one really "wants" gold except as a store of value, and even though, not because it is productive, but because they believe other people will also value it. So it is basically not very different from a fiat currency in that respect. It is money because we say it is.

Some have calculated that a return to the gold standard would lead to the gold price going up to approximately $40,000 per ounce.

The infrastructure that allows money to have and keep it's value has to be paid for somehow. Deflation makes it hard to get the economy going again. When your money will be worth more tomorrow than it is worth today, why would you spend.

One analogy I like to use are the roads. If everyone paid for road usage on a per mile basis, then you would have some people possibly paying next to nothing for the roads. However, they get all of the security of having roads available whenever they need them, even if they don't necessarily need them all the time.

Same with money. If you save, you are taking advantage of the fact that those engaged in economic activity and whose activity supports the value of your savings. If that economic activity ceases, why should you expect the value of your money to remain the same.

I don't think there is any reason why intertemporal transfers of wealth (fancy phrase for saying money earned at one point is spent at a different time) should be costless. it's one of those things that some people believe to be obviously right, but there is no a priori reason why that should always be the case. Most forms of wealth degrade over time (with the exception of land and metals like gold) so the idea that one's wealth just sustains is fairly unusual. Think about it, you car depreciates, houses fall into disrepair and ruin, farm animals die if they aren't taken care of. Most people take it as a given that their wealth loses value all the time. No reason why money should be any different.

Who modded this insightful?

Banks don't just take deposits. Banks also lend money to businesses. In fact, banks lend more than they take in deposits due to the magic of the fractional reserve.

If banks just took your money and placed it under a pillow (figuratively) until you needed it, then you would have to pay some hefty fees for that. The fact that they can make money with your money is one of the reasons you can have "free" or close to free banking.

Agree that this is why governments back currencies. However, I view quantitative easing and other "financial repression" techniques less as theft and more as Governments taking decision in the greater good. For economies to grow, risks need to be taken, and if you have a class of overly cautious people holding onto currency, then a dose of QE either encourages them to invest, or reduces the debts owed by investors and encourages those investors to invest more. If the economic wheel stops spinning, your dollars will become worthless anyway, so QE is the better devil.

Well, not when the value of Bitcoin has dropped from above $1,000 to about $400. That's a -60% return, and even the near zero returns on short dated treasuries are a much better return than that!

So yes, you keep the nominal value of your Bitcoin protected, but the real value is incredible volatile, and there is no guarantee that it will recover. Unless you are pretty sure that there will be some suckers in the future who will give you your return.

Because, the free market!

People seriously think that a completely unregulated currency in a completely unregulated banking system will ever work.

No it isn't. A payment method (unit of exchange) absolutely needs to be stable, because you do not want the transaction costs of converting it to and from other currencies. If you incur those costs anyway, then what is the point of having it as a unit of exchange. You would otherwise be taking a risk each time you transact that the value will drop (significantly) while you hold the bitcoins, so that doesn't work either.

No one is being banned for visiting a website. People are being banned if the software determines that they are cheating, and verifies this by checking to see if they have performed a DNS lookup to servers known to be used for cheating in the games. Basically, they are using the DNS to try and prevent false positives.

If they let the cheats degrade the user experience, they might end up losing their good customers, and this ruins their business.

Basically, the DNS probably only "saves" you if you aren't actually cheating. If you are, then refusal to allow the check may be taken at tacit admission that you are, in fact, using the cheats.

You are using their service. You agree to their terms. Don't like it, don't use their service.

They are only looking out for their honest customers who would otherwise be affected by the cheating that would go on, and who may then decide to leave and not return.

You could say this about the early adopters of pretty much any technology. And yet without them, the world is a very different place because no one would take any risks.

English is not the most gender neutral language in use. It is far from it. You literally can't talk about a person without referring to their gender unless you decided to talk in a very awkward manner. and yes, I count using "it" as talking in an awkward manner.

My first language does not have any gender specific pronouns at all. Zero. Zilch. None. It has pronouns that are only used for humans though, and they are all gender neutral. You can't get more gender neutral than not having any gender specific pronouns. It means you can talk about a man as you would about a woman, and if someone joined a conversation about a person midway, and the people in the conversation didn't talk about anything gender specific, you wouldn't know if they were talking about a man or a woman.

Actually, the Dems won the "popular vote" in the congressional elections as well.

And the Republicans have Texas as well.

It's sixes of one and half a dozen of the other to be honest, but there are reasons to believe that the Dems would have the advantage (hence why only Democrat controlled states are represented in the National Popular Vote Compact. If the Republicans thought they would win,, they would want the popular vote "by hook or by crook", and they would support that initiative. Unless you believe that the Republicans believe in the constitution so much that they are not willing to do an "end run" around certain constitutional provisions if it would suit them.

They want to make phone theft less likely. It is expensive to have to track stolen phones worth in the region of $200-500, and is really not worth doing. Arresting people is expensive. By the time they have sold the phone on to someone else, it become very costly to contemplate to recover a single phone.

Prevention is cheaper than cure, and that is true here. Thieves will stop stealing things they can't make a decent profit out of. This is a market based solution for the theft problem. Make stolen phones valueless, and people will stop stealing them.

Stripping a phone for parts reduces the value to thieves. That is also an important side-effect of the law. Most thieves want to sell working phone without attempting to find people who want the screen or the back of the phone, and perhaps the flash chips. Making phone less attractive to muggers reduces muggings for said phones.

Do these muggers usually crawl away or something. I can't imagine the police are going to respond quickly enough to catch a non-stupid mugger anywhere near their victim, even if they rang the police themselves before hotfooting it.