Even if this is true, where is the evidence that we're in imminent danger of hyperinflation? Despite mounting public debt, U.S. inflation has remained incredibly low since the start of the financial crisis four years ago, as has the interest rate that must be paid by the government to issue new debt.

From what I can tell, we have on the one side a dollar that has endured as a value store and medium of exchange for hundreds of years, and which has proven remarkably resilient (valuable) by any objective measure throughout the worst economic implosion since the Great Depression (which the dollar also survived). On the other hand we have Bitcoin which is intriguing in many ways but which has demonstrable volatility even just in the short span of its existence. And which, as a feature, is not backed (in the hard economic sense) by any nation or bank. I mean it's cool and all but I see where Krugman is coming from.

If every merchant you patronize today accepted Bitcoin, would you rather have Bitcoin in your bank account or dollars? I'd rather have Bitcoin. They're easier to transfer, they can't be counterfeited, and their supply can't be manipulated.

If every merchant accepts Bitcoin and every consumer agrees with my logic, hyperinflation of the dollar would occur. Coinbase and its 0% transaction fees will lead to rapid adoption of Bitcoin on the merchant side. I'm less confident about the consumer side, but I see that happening as well.

I am also baffled by "they're easier to transfer" than dollars. Yes you can email BTC. But I can literally hand you dollars. No smartphone needed! And large amounts are trivially easier - I squiggle some lines on a piece of paper and hand it to you. Or if you want to stick to smartphones I can pull one out and send you dollars using one of dozens of e-payment platforms.

Interesting thesis though.

Transferring large amounts of dollars takes days. Transferring Bitcoin takes 10 minutes or so.

Transfers are slow because there is little need to transfer large amounts of money quickly, and slower transactions help address issues with fraud. If you are buying a car, or paying for a house there is little need for a fast transactions. So with BTC or USD, transferring large amounts of money will take days.

My debit card/square/venmo might have something to say about that...

You just don't notice it because they pay the miners by printing money. I'll be really interested to see what happens when they stop that and start relying on up front transaction fees to fund the network.

If 90% of the network is powered down to reduce transaction fees, that gives someone the opportunity to buy up 20% of it on the cheap and corrupt the network. Bitcoin has to use as many resources as possible to stay secure.

Right now the mining rewards being minted increase the Bitcoin supply at a rate of 11% per year. If demand for Bitcoin were constant, this would amount to 11% inflation. Demand for Bitcoin is currently increasing, so it is net deflationary, but this only lasts as long as the demand for Bitcoin is growing constantly. If you kept mining rewards high after the demand for Bitcoins had stabilized, you'd have five times the inflation of the dreaded US dollar, as you paid for your infrastructure costs through inflationary taxation.

(Which Benjamin Franklin and I actually like, but that's another issue entirely.)

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/ec...

So Bitcoin could be valuable in disrupting payment systems:

  Step 1: Bitcoin becomes superior to traditional payment systems.
  Step 2: This becomes relevant enough in the large scheme of things
    that Bitcoin gets serious adoption outside of speculation.
  Step 3: Traditional payment providers up their game.
  Step 4: Traditional payment providers win, because their intrinsic costs are lower
    (mining is inherently costly and not needed for traditional payment systems).

If everyone adopted bitcoin, the velocity of the dollar would approach zero. Which means that inflation would go down, not up.

And yes, I would rather have my [savings] account in a hard, non-inflationary currency. On the other hand, I can only earn interest when someone is willing to take a loan in the currency and pay interest on it. And I am not about to take out a loan in a hard currency when perfectly good inflationary currencies are easily at hand. So, you're going to have a hard time finding a bank that pays interest on bitcoins. This is why "bad money drives out good", aka Gresham's law.

Sadly it is not so easy to make money this way, the forward exchange rates will cancel out any gain from the interest earned in the inflationary currency. Otherwise everyone would do this.

You can make money doing this but really you are just taking a bet on exchange rates, you can easily lose money as well if the fx goes the wrong way during your investment period.

There are very few risk free ways to make more money than investing in US Treasuries.

Assuming the interest rates are the same, I'd agree. Would they be?

I doubt they'd be the same in either nominal or real terms. But that's a side issue.

You could already do what you're talking about with gold. A bank could offer gold savings accounts that pay interest on gold loans. They don't do it. Borrowers are deflation-averse and no one wants to deal with the exchange rate fluctuations.

BTC has some legit uses (like buying unjustly banned consciousness-expanding products over the internets) but the built-in deflationary death spiral in its design pretty much ensures that it will never be a serious full-spectrum parallel currency, much less a replacement for the dollar and euro.

When Bitcoin is the primary currency, there will be interest-bearing Bitcoin deposits.

http://bitcoin.org/en/faq#wont-bitcoin-fall-in-a-deflationar...

Same goes for the borrower and deflation risk.

Edit: I guess if the deflation risk tolerance for the borrower and the inflation risk tolerance for the bank are asymmetrical, then you would just end up with being able to loan one or the other. I suspect, per Slurry's point, that it's BTC that loses here.

At this point, and in the foreseeable future? Dollars. I'm not sure where people find all this friction relating to using dollars in the real world. I have no problems whatsoever. Besides, it's all virtual currency.

As far as your theory of widespread adoption of bitcoin leading to hyperinflation of the dollar, I'm don't even begin to understand how you see that working.

It's still vulnerable to computational attacks (no matter how impractical they may be) and miner collusion.

There's no need to regulate computing capacity when you have the power to tax enough wealth to ensure that the government always has more computing capacity. It's an arms race without the nuclear winter, and with the side effects of increased pollution and rapidly advancing processing power.

There's something you're overlooking though: the dollar was backed by gold until 1971, and that's where our problems really started mounting.

There's a somewhat cyclical argument here, as a semi-deflationary (or at least unregulated) currency was already standard for many years, and central banking and regulated currencies grew because that system was unacceptable. So you could say that central banking was a response to problems with Bitcoin-like currencies, and Bitcoin is therefore reactionary. There is little evidence yet that Bitcoin is anything but a reactionary currency, and no evidence that crypto-currencies are in any way "the future" (I believe they will be used in the future, perhaps more than they are used now, just as gold and diamonds are still used in some circles; but I don't see any indication that they are the future).

Historically (you should read http://www.amazon.com/Great-Wave-Revolutions-Rhythm-History-...) inflationary money systems have been the tools of those in power to quietly take from the poor and less powerful. Whether or not the current era of central banking was intended to be that way is a question for conspiracy theorists - but it's very clear that that is exactly what it has become. These inflationary systems were ALWAYS less stable than their preceding deflationary systems, and ALWAYS ended in revolution, or conquering, or plagues, or what not.

Even Keynes knew this to be true:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Consider a poor family spending about 90% of their income on day to day expenses; versus a rich family spending 20% of their income - if there's 10% inflation, the poor family will go from a 10% margin of survival to a 1% margin of survival, which is a 90% reduction of ability to survive or save. Vice the rich family which has only suffered a 2.5% decrease in this margin.

Let's say (and this is atypical, as I said, poor people are usually less in debt than rich people) the poor family is additionally 5% in debt, versus 0% as in the rich case. Do you think it's any consolation that the 5% debt is nominally valued (and therefore decreasing in real terms) in the face of the fact that the family now is spending 104% of their income on day to day expenses? Moreover, the way in which poor people use debt (very short-term loans) typically involves interest rates that are far too high to take advantage of real reduction in value, and are over far to short of a term even if they had reasonable interest rates.

Now obviously these numbers were chosen because they make the calculations easier; but you should consider plugging in values of your own and proving that it is general.

Ultimately, calculations of the alleged losers of moderate positive and predictable inflation are meaningless without taking into account its positive sum effects: when "bury it under the ground" isn't an acceptable investment strategy earning average returns, more real goods and services will be produced.

two, if you think people won't consume if the money is deflationary, you're crazy. The US had net deflation for most of its history (except during wars) from 1600-1910, and certainly there was plenty of growth. Also, analogous to the "why do you ever bother buying computers knowing that they depreciate rapidly".

three. If you think laborers get paid wages that match inflation, you are crazy. In fact, as krugman himself states: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hig... " that there’s another case for a higher inflation rate ... It goes like this: even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

You cannot simultaneously make the claim that inflation will fix the sticky wages problem and also claim that wages will catch up with inflation.

four. "when "bury it under the ground" isn't an acceptable investment strategy earning average returns, more real goods and services will be produced." in other words, artificially encourage people to spend so as to enrich the already-wealthy. This should give a hint as to where the wealthy actually do store their wealth, and why inflation benefits them while stealing from the poor. Related: Encourage people to artificially spend more money on stuff they don't need without regard to the downstream environmental effects of increased consumption.

And for all but the last 45 years of that 410-year period, the US also had the ability to obtain labor by force and without compensation. And even afterward, for many decades and well beyond the 1910 cutoff, the US had labor arrangements which only were not classified as slavery due to legal hair-splitting over the definition of the term.

Thus, we can just as easily argue that slavery is correlated with economic growth. Or that disregard for the intellectual-property laws of other countries is associated with growth (see the US in the 19th century, China in the 20th and early 21st). Or... well, lots of complicated factors that you seem to want to gloss over to make an argument in favor of one and only one factor.

(and that's without getting into the volatility of gold-backed currency, the boom/bust cycles, the fights over whether to have a single or bimetallic standard, etc. etc.)

I am sympathetic to both claims, given that it's possible that economic growth in the modern era is only made possible by massive credit expansion (voluntary, fractional slavery.

boom/bust cycles are normal, what's so bad about them? If the claim is that people get hurt then the question we have to ask is why aren't we stepping forward to help them? As for single or bimetallic standard, those are of course political issues, I'm not as well versed to the reasons for them but it appears to me to basically be a pre-hashing (if you will) of the same arguments we're having now about inflationary vs. deflationary currency, except with more of granularity concern (not an issue with bitcoins).

Backers of a gold-only standard (mostly in the eastern US) wanted it because their fortunes were already amassed, and denominated in gold or gold-backed currency, and they did not want this diluted by the influx of silver from mines in the western US. Backers of the bimetallic standard had access to silver mines, or to the resulting silver, and wanted the ability to either have silver coined, or to present it and receive in return legal tender (which had been taken away in 1873).

For an edifying take on the populist/bimetallic position, consider reading William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, which is full of eminently-quotable and still-relevant lines. For example, a rebuttal of what came to be known as the "trickle-down" theory:

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between "the idle holders of idle capital" and "the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country"; and, my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of "the idle holders of idle capital" or upon the side of "the struggling masses"? That is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

Hence the argument for "trickle up", effectively, as opposed to "trickle down".

You might want to consider what they do hoard their wealth in. It's not currency, and they also don't buy gold - they buy companies, stocks, and bonds.

What do all those things have in common?

I'm sorry, but I need you to connect the dots a bit better if I'm to understand this.

Obviously if I thought wealthy people actually did hoard their wealth in dollars I wouldn't have made the point about inflation inducing people not to hold their wealth in dollars. Wealthy people could, would, and probably should hoard large portions of their wealth in dollars in the absence of inflation though.

I didn't making any points about people not wanting to consume if the money is deflationary, because obviously there are limits to how far one would want to defer consumption. Consumption /= investment. Investment is based around getting returns, and if average return is zero then there's very little incentive to invest instead of hoarding coins for those neither certain of beating the market nor particularly enthralled by taking risks. US prices oscillated wildly between 1600-1910 so it was hardly a sustained deflation in which burying dollars in the ground was the most reliable way of ensuring continued purchasing power in a couple of years time, but it's worth noting that growth was a bit more impressive after 1910...

Three. The whole point of the "sticky wages" argument for inflation - one I didn't actually make - is that as relative prices in an economy shift, the real value of some workers' contribution falls, but they still have bargaining power sufficient to ensure this subset of the labour force doesn't accept wage cuts (they take job losses instead). A corollary of this is that productive workers in growing industries can and do have sufficient power to demand higher annual wage escalators, and inflationary increases to payscales are commonplace in normal economic climates. Nothing about the sticky wages problem implies that wages relative to labour productivity of a segment of the economy can't catch up with inflation, in which case the median worker can ask for and get accept their annual inflationary pay rise. But I haven't mentioned the sticky wages argument. Actually I went out of my way not to mention the sticky wages argument, by giving a theoretical examples where wages were all indexed, and emphasising the importance of inflation in providing investment stimulus was far more significant than its distributional effects.

As for point four, I'm honestly not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding me to make a rhetorical attack or genuinely don't understand that "investment strategy" and "encouraging people to ... spend more money on stuff they don't need" are not the same thing, and the poor generally benefit a lot more from the rich investing in job creation than the rich buying nice little cabinets full of gold.

Sounds suspiciously like "trickle down economics". And that's not the appropriate comparison. The appropriate comparison is, do the poor benefit more from the rich "investing in job creation" or by themselves having easy access to a mechanism by which their wages and savings are not eroded (in a compounding fashion) by fiat?

That's not an argument. When rich people (or any people) get wealthier that really does benefit everyone; the problem with classical "trickle down economics" was the idea that this meant it was ok to exempt them from taxes, as if tax money was just wasted.

> And that's not the appropriate comparison. The appropriate comparison is, do the poor benefit more from the rich "investing in job creation" or by themselves having easy access to a mechanism by which their wages and savings are not eroded (in a compounding fashion) by fiat?

Policies that increase the value of cash savings (at least, to the point where it's more profitable than investing in stocks or the like) benefit the rich, and policies that decrease the value of cash savings benefit the poor, because the rich are much more able to save than the poor, and cash really is a zero-sum game. If the dollar ever became deflationary, rich people would sell their stocks and buy up ~all the dollars and capture almost all of the increasing value (businesses would probably stop paying wages out in dollars); meanwhile startups would find it much harder to attract investment, which would be bad for everyone.

Unacceptable to whom?

So, 1600-1900 in the US (minus wars which were incredibly inflationary but always temporary in that era) not enough for you?

The counterargument is this: In the era of central banking we have struggled to figure out how to make the economy work with endemic inflation. And it's failing. The two eras where the gap between the rich and the poor widened in a protracted, long-term fashion, have been in the aftermath of FDR's great dollar devaluation and after Nixon closed the gold window. 1972 was the last year the rich-poor gap was closing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977547

Good luck with that. You've just said something along the lines of, "we'll just have to figure out how to live with terminal cancer."

Now, I'm no economist, but deflation is standardly seen as really, really bad, and for good reason. It's not just 'the opposite of inflation', as you probably know: it's an accelerating, self-intensifying brake on commerce.

How? Ask yourself: why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?

I know the the correct, rational answer to this question: "I won't buy it today, or ever, because it will always be cheaper the next day." (And then the deflationary spiral begins!)

But if this is really true, why has anyone bought a Playstation 4 or Xbox One? They will undoubtedly be cheaper in two or three or ten years. Well, consumers might be totally irrational; what about firms? Why has any company in history ever bought a computer when the price of computing power has been falling rapidly and (mostly) predictably for fifty years?

I don't think the question "Why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?" fully explains the behavior of people in the face of increasing purchasing power; there seems to be something else going on. Any thoughts?

* Buy it now for $300 and play it for 10 years

* Buy it in ten years for $30 and play it then

(I have no idea how much an Xbox actually costs.)

So the question is whether that $270 is worth those ten years of playing it. A lot goes into that: what interesting things could I do with $270? How about in 10 years? How much do I want to play the games available for Xbox? Won't all my friends want to come over and play with me? Etc. Buying now might be perfectly rational, depending on your utility function.

"I won't buy it today because it will be cheaper tomorrow" is an argument on the margins. That's why temporary bouts of deflation don't cause everyone to starve to death because they keep putting off buying food.

But those margins do matter a great deal! There's some set of stuff that I really am going to wait on, because I only kinda want them now. There's certainly a discount rate for the Xbox that could cause all but the hardest-core fan to wait. So the deflation spiral doesn't take much to get started.

I'm not saying humans are rational (though I will argue that corporations do better here), only that the Xbox One example doesn't prove they're not, and that it's still consistent with the deflation spiral concept.

You also mention that this limited ability to defer purchases in the face of deflation is what makes short bouts of deflation not catastrophic -- it is somewhat difficult to get the deflationary spiral going if you can't actually wait to purchase things.

Given all this, the interesting question to me is, how much deflation does it take to actually cause a deflationary spiral? The answer is likely complicated, given that it depends on the specific utility functions for each consumer of all the goods and services that they consume.

Empirically, we seem to be able to cope with a decent amount of deflation, at least when it is limited to certain goods, like video game consoles, computing power, other manufactured goods, etc. (In some cases, even over very long timespans.)

One specific observation here is that short-lived deflations may not cause much behavior change because everyone expects them to be short lived. And changing your behavior is hard work, and your standard of living is sticky; you don't adapt right way, even if you're a business. Easier to just ride it out. But as the deflation period drags on, that consumption floor starts to fall (everything here is mutable!) as you get acclimated to the new normal. Since consumer confidence actually lags the other economic metrics a bit, an economy has a bit of time to pop out of deflation before the spiral really sets in. On the other hand, it makes it worse when it does.

It's also important to look at context: in that empirical evidence, we should note that the central banks were fighting deflation as hard as they could withe somewhat limited tools they had, so it isn't a spiral in a vacuum. Even then, Japan lost an entire decade of economic progress to deflation.

On specific items like video games consoles and computing power, I'd guess it's some combination of a) the utility of the items actually being quite compelling at their launch prices and b) a trick of psychology: in 10 years, there will be new, better video games and you'll want those instead, so you don't even really consider buying it later. (b) is irrational, because the console you're buying now is either worth it or not now; you don't actually have to buy it later at all. But it strikes me as very human. I think public has largely just accepted the premise the technology costs a certain amount; it just looks forward to having new features that fall into its locked-in price range.

On the other hand, one way to think about the technology stuff is that perhaps it really has held back a lot of the industry. For example, perhaps the price of the Xbox is artificially low at launch time because otherwise everyone would just wait for it to come down anyway; it's competing with its future self. The thought experiment is to ask how different purchasing decisions would be if an industry-wide announcement came out saying, "Moore's law is over. This is as good as computers get. They're going to cost X and do Y for the foreseeable future." Because I suspect a lot of people do put off technology purchases, waiting for everything to get better and cheaper. The complement of early adoption.

I should caveat that this is basically all speculation on my part; I don't actually know anything about any of this stuff.

The problem is that the economic theories often cited by Bitcoin supporters presume certain fanciful behaviors.

For example, in economic-theorist world, a frictionless spherical perfectly-informed perfectly-rational actor does not buy a six-pack of beer. Instead, the actor makes decisions:

* I will buy one beer at this unit price. Will I buy two?

* I will buy two beers at this unit price. Will I buy three?

* I will buy three beers at this unit price. Will I buy four?

* I will buy four beers at this unit price. Will I buy five?

* I will buy five beers at this unit price. Will I buy six?

* I will buy six beers at this unit price. Will I buy seven?

* I will not buy seven beers at this unit price.

* Therefore I will buy six beers.

I've long assumed that all the people who actually make decisions in this way are locked up in the laboratories of mad economists, who observe their behaviors in the way a biologist might observe a terrarium.

I think you haven't really looked into deflation in detail, quite frankly.

So would another planet colliding into the earth, fortunately we're in danger of neither.

> If blockchain currencies are the future, central banking is over, and our society will have to figure out how to make the economy work with endemic deflation.

No. Deflation is a part of bitcoin, not of crypto currencies in general. When deflation shows itself to be the problem it likely will be, we'll just switch to a better crypto currency that has predictable inflation built in; they exist already.

Is that like "Real Estate only goes up?" Remember that one from circa 2005?

This problem really does lead to crypto currencies having no floor like Krugman points out. At some point everyone decides what the next hot crypto currency is, and suddenly Bitcoin turns into Friendster and there's a rush for the exits and the price collapses.

It really does seem like cryptocurrency fanboys have bought into a form of "this time its different" because... crypto. And they're ignoring the fact that it is a currency with zero to backstop, and its clearly dependent upon fashion and popularity, since there's a growing marketplace now of competing cryptocurrencies.

This thread has been very useful to convince me that bitcoin is a classic bubble. I have no idea when it'll pop, but it appears almost certain that it will.

No, it's saying that Bitcoin has the feature that people who like Gold like, the supply can't be artificially inflated. That's all. Keynsian's won't like that because that means it's deflationary.

> This problem really does lead to crypto currencies having no floor like Krugman points out.

Krugman is wrong because he doesn't see the inherent value in them yet, and there is value in shopping online without giving the retailer my credit card details and without the retailer being worried about charge backs and banking fees; but he didn't see the value in the Internet either.

Brilliant people are often wrong when stepping outside their domain, and he clearly doesn't yet understand the technological advantages of crypto currencies.

He's right that deflationary currencies won't function well as currencies in the end, which is why Bitcoin could be MySpace and a better designed crypto may ultimately win, but network effects give Bitcoin the chance to fail before someone else can win. However Bitcoin need only become stable enough to be used to move money around and it'll have a ton of value to lots of people whether it's deflationary or not simply to avoid banks, fees, and chargebacks.

You admit that some other crypto currency may win. That means that bitcoin may lose.

Lose.

LOSE

What happens when it LOSES?

Like Krugman points out, there's nothing to backstop it and no floor.

Oh right, but he's just an economist, he doesn't see the "inherent value". He just doesn't understand...

You so easily swap contexts completely between all of this "inherent value" nonsense when you're addressing Krugman, and then a marketplace of cryptocurrencies which clearly is 'libertarian' and is going to have clear winners and losers -- without, obviously, thinking that last word through very clearly.

I'm clearly going to need to load up on popcorn, this is gonna be fun to watch...

Your thinking is very binary. It's possible that another crypto currency becomes the biggest one, that doesn't mean bitcoin loses, it means it's not the reserve currency that it is now. You don't seem to understand that people have different ideas about how a currency should function and each crypto that comes out will attract those that agree with its rules. Bitcoin is designed for Austrian economic fans who think inflation of the money supply is the worst thing ever. They will never abandon it for another crypto, it's already exactly what they want. Keynsian's will eventually move to something that includes built in inflation.

> Like Krugman points out, there's nothing to backstop it and no floor.

Yes there is, it has utility; even if another crypto becomes the more favored currency, Bitcoin will remain the digital gold it is because it's deflationary, easily tradable, and aligns ideologically with how many people think money should work (they're wrong, but that doesn't matter).

> I'm clearly going to need to load up on popcorn, this is gonna be fun to watch...

It's already fun to watch. That neither you or Krugman see inherent value in crypto currencies is something both of you will come around on eventually. He certainly changed his mind about the Internet being no more useful than a fax machine.

Hey, I love Krugman, we agree on much, but on this, he's simply wrong and he's been very wrong very publicly before. Your appeal to his authority is not a valid argument for why Bitcoin is a bubble, if you can't make your own, then move on but don't get snarky with this "he just doesn't understand" b.s. you're slinging; it's unbecoming.

For example the German hyperinflation was started by "London ultimatum" that demanded reparations in gold or foreign currency.