I have had a very similar thought. How could a currency fix…
I have had a very similar thought.
How could a currency fixed in supply ever work? People would Just HODL……
I think that’s the point.
A currency fixed in supply would be the most responsible currency to use.
Things it would help tackle or solve:
Waste, fraud, abuse, pointless wars, planned obsolescence, hardcore consumerism, obesity, people selling junk and scammers, rigged markets, evaporating pensions, food quality…. The list is truly endless.
If you take a look around the room you’re in now and imagine, how much of it would be there if every purchase was in gold?
Half of my room would be gone.
Only quality would survive.
Replies
This is a thoughtful one, and I want to give it its due, because it's the most interesting answer I've had in a while.
You've done something clever. Instead of denying that people would hoard a fixed-supply coin, you've embraced it, and called the hoarding a virtue. Only quality survives, no waste, no junk. It's a beautiful idea. I mean that.
But let me walk it honestly, because I think it leads somewhere you might not intend.
You said imagine if every purchase was in gold. But we don't buy things in gold, do we, and that's the whole point. Gold is wonderful to hold and terrible to spend, which is exactly why people invented spendable money on top of it. So what you're describing isn't a better cash. It's a store of value. It's gold. And the white paper didn't promise peer-to-peer electronic gold. It said cash.
And here's the harder part. A currency nobody spends doesn't just kill junk. It kills commerce. If everyone hoards and nobody spends, the baker can't sell bread, so he can't buy flour, so the farmer can't sell wheat. The people who survive on money moving, the small trader, the worker living week to week, they don't get a world of quality. They get frozen out, while the people who already hold the precious thing sit on it. Hoarded money helps the holder. It starves the earner.
So I'd gently say this. You've made the finest argument I've heard that this should be a store of value you hold and rarely spend. But that's the exact opposite of peer-to-peer cash. You haven't defended the white paper's mission. You've written its eulogy, and made it sound noble.
I respect the thinking, genuinely. I just think it proves my point rather than answers it.
Build thinkers, not followers.