Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:06:51 AM

Quote from: Johnny Mnemonic on June 12, 2014, 02:25:46 AM

It is well established that finite money supplies don't work over the long term.

Not a promising strategy in a currency.

Gold has done just fine for thousands of years. There are only two reasons why nobody spends it:

- The problems it has due to its physical nature
- Government bans

The supply of gold has been inflating by 1.5% - 2.5% for thousands of years. Thank you for strengthening my argument.

Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:06:51 AM

Smooth was just telling us how he sees economics as a pseudoscience, and I agreed. So please don't say things like "it is well established that" inflation is good and deflation is bad. It's like a fallacious appeal to authority.

I'm sorry if your judgement is getting clouded by facts. If you and smooth think econ is junk science, then any reasonable debate goes out the window. It's like arguing with religious folks where any logic gets defeated "because God says so."

I didn't say anything about "good" or "bad". I said a finite money supply has a limited lifespan:

Wealth is power-law distributed: http://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/papers/PhysicaA-299-213-2001.pdf

The quantity theory of money ( M x V = P x Q ) says that if supply M remains constant or decreases, then velocity V must increase exponentially, which is not sustainable. Hell, I'll just quote AnonyMint:

Quote from: AnonyMint link=topic=222998.msg3615848#msg3615848

We can conclude that if P x Q ≅ nominal GDP is rising by 5% per annum, then either M or V or some combination must also rise by 5% per annum. So if M were constant or falling, then V would have to rise exponentially faster than 5%.
...
In short, exponential growth of velocity can not physically continue forever. And the faster it is growing, the faster the economy must overheat and correct.

So we can conclude that those who are argue for benefits of a constant money supply have no mathematical acumen.

As time increases, circulating supply will shrink to nothing. This is true because math (and common sense) says so (unless you disbelieve that as well).

Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:06:51 AM

The discussion would be easier if instead of saying "inflation will pay for that" we simply said "savers will pay for that".

Savers are useless non-contributors. Not that there's anything wrong with saving, but economies of scale don't depend on it, and so there's no economic justification to encourage it.

Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:06:51 AM

There is a common belief that the amount of transactions is far more important for the price than the savers/investors, which is absolutely false. Number of transactions is only an interesting indicator that the currency has a lot of utility, that it's accepted everywhere. Utility drives the price up, spending for no reason does not. One guy above was even suggesting that we punish stale coins, and that we move our coins for the sake of it. That's dogma right there.

Careful, this is starting to sound a lot like economic theory Wink

But I agree with you on the stale coin matter. It's a non-solution that's dancing around the heart of the problem.

Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:06:51 AM

If you, like me, want to see the price go "to the moon", what you want is savers/investors.

I don't want to see the price go "to the moon." I see that as an unambitious (and somewhat selfish) perspective. What I want is an ultra high volume, massively scalable world currency, capable of competing with or replacing fiat. That cannot be achieved with a finite money supply.