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Originally Posted by Rathji
All good points.
You might argue that having a decentralized currency that is free of influence from governments is a good thing.
I don't know how much that I agree with that thought process, but that is one of the things which many proponents of mining say about it.
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From governments sure. That's why one of the preconditions of economic stability in developed countries is having an independent central bank in order to regulate the money supply without government political interference.
Bitcoin's premise and probably why it's popular among many is that it essentially creates an artificial gold standard. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that moving off the gold standard was actually a bad thing.
It wasn't. The reason why we have inflation around 2-3% (Like we have seen in most stable countires since the 80s) is because price stability is carefully managed by the bank of Canada and the US Federal reserve to have inflation in that range. Why not target lower inflation than 2-3%? Because the only thing orders of magnitude worse than high inflation is
deflation (High inflation = US and Canada in the 1970s, deflation = great depression 1930s, and could have been 2008-2009 had central banks not printed money), and a central bank wants to keep enough cushion away from deflation so they target a managable inflation level while keeping low enough to avoid a lot of it's problems.
Now back to why we moved off the gold standard. The growth in the world's economy and the population of the world essentially was forecasted to exceed the growth in gold production to avoid deflation. Deflation is bad, because once economic participants expect their currnecy to appreciate in value they stop using it as a currency and start hording it like a commodity and thus people stop spending money and economies are broken down.
Bitcoin's very design is to encourage deflation by limiting the amount of bitcoins produced to 21 million, hence it's existing model is completely unacceptable in every way from ever being a dominant widespread means of exchange.