Quote from: Spaceman_Spiff on October 24, 2016, 09:23:01 PM

I disagree. Why would I as an individual hold anything else than the deflationary kind of money if it is equally easy to store and spend it as the inflationary type.

Because modern societies don't like prices floating all over the place due to a fixed supply monetary base. It makes it impossible to plan and you'd have loads of manufacturing businesses, for example, simply going bust. Even if you did have a fixed supply they'd just invest in a huge amount of hedging derivatives to minimise their exposure to price volatility and that would inflate the effective money supply instead.

As economies expand, demands for liquidity have to be met. They can either be met by expanding and contracting the money supply (and keeping prices relatively stable) or by price inflation - which will just carry a similar cost in terms of adverse commercial conditions, bankruptcies and localised losses. If you're a car manufacturer, you're more interested in the "stable price" type of money. If you're a long term saver then you're more interested in the "stable supply" type of money. There have always been these two types and always will be.

Quote from: becoin on October 24, 2016, 09:22:23 PM

Only investment grade physical gold. It is tradeable everywhere!

Well you can't sell the gold bar under your bed to a customer on the other side of the planet and deliver it at the same time, so it isn't tradable everywhere. You can transfer ownership to them instantly but not possession.

The whole basis of gold's value traditionally is that it was a bearer token where possession and ownership were synonymous. If you like, in that sense it was the "physical bitcoin" of its day. But it is no longer able to perform that role because we've moved to electronic platforms and left the physical behind. That's the reason it failed to gain anything over the last 8 years of money printing.