Money, says Moldbug, is a bubble that never bursts, until it does.
A very long time ago, all sorts of strange things, such as dog canine
teeth, were money.
It came to pass that only silver and gold were money.
And then only gold. The demonetization of silver gave us the long
depression, which by modern standards was not bad at all - because it
was long, gold rose, which is to say prices fell, very slowly, because
silver was demonetized very slowly. People did not like it, hence the
"cross of gold speech" demanding that state power be applied to
remonetize silver, but all the supposed horrid evils of deflation turned
out to be not very evil at all.
From time to time governments discover that they can make some
arbitrary thing money by the mere exercise of power. This usually ends
horribly badly.
Right now we have the disturbing and strange situation that it is hard
for savers to receive positive real interest on their money, and at the
same time hard for worthy borrowers to borrow money. The system is
malfunctioning rather badly, but monetary systems have frequently
malfunctioned one hell of a lot worse, so I will not bother explaining
why we are in this hole. (tl; dr; Governments did wicked, but extremely
popular, things with money. To the surprise of many people, myself
among them, this did not destroy the currency, but it had other
extremely bad effects.)
Because of governments doing bad things with money, the thought occurred
to some people: maybe private individuals, not armed with state power,
could make some arbitrary thing power.
Turns out, we could.
