Quote from: MoonShadow on June 26, 2011, 06:33:40 AM

Quote from: unk on June 26, 2011, 06:21:00 AM

it is only recently that it was hard to match inflation in a bank account, and the reason for that has more to do with the unique failures of central banks over the last few years than the generalised problems that people here want to assign to all central banks everywhere, throughout time.

Well, that's just it. The recent failures of central banking over the last few years were not only not unique, they were entirely predictable from the moment the central banks shed the discipline of the gold standard and thus gained the power to inflate. That is what happens to all fiat currencies. It always has. Just because we are finally starting to see the fatal imbalances in the system accumulate to a visible level, doesn't mean that those imbalances were not there from the start. They were, and I believe that you are smart enough to understand that. The cognative dissonance that you are experiencing within this forum is not a unique affliction. Most people very much desire to believe that the society that they live within is a predominately honest one, and that the image that it presents to us is not fraudulent. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but what you have been told since you were a child, what your parents believed, and what you believe about the best intentions of those who command these vast monetary systems is a lie.

but do you honestly think that kind of general, simplistic statement is convincing? merely because you claim something and present it as revolutionary doesn't make it correct. you're asserting things seemingly in response to very particular analysis i've offered showing that both inflation and deflation can be priced into alternative currencies, which can then be chosen freely as competing investments, at least in the absence of transaction costs. that cold analysis is what i 'believe', not what my 'parents' told me about central banks.

note that i'm not one of the people whose knee-jerk reaction was 'bitcoin can't work because it's deflationary'. my response was instead 'they're all mistaken to think it matters; it doesn't, on either side'.

in any event, one of the most frustrating things about anti-government extremists is their perception of themselves as visionaries who see truths that nobody else sees. the reality is that most of us flirted with similar ideas in our teenage years and then outgrew them, faced with the complex realities of the world and the recognition that not everything has simple answers. i hate to sound condescending, but outside internet message boards like this one, adjectives like 'juvenile' and 'sixth-form' come up much more often than 'idealist' or 'visionary' to describe that kind of extremism. and that is not because anyone feels threatened or surprised, and it is not because everyone outside this message board is corrupt or otherwise undermined.