Nick Szabo  🔑

George is a fellow OG but this is wrong. Bitcoin is seamlessly global, it does not and need not conform to the ideological speculations ("macroeconomic theories") of particular polities.https://twitter.com/GeorgeSelgin/status/1021553927324688386 …

Dr. Selgin was on the mailing list with Wei Dai and myself where in 1998 cryptocurrency (bit gold, and a bit later b-money) was invented. His description of free banking was very inspirational and informative.

(Also Larry White's description of free banking). My two-layer architecture (bit gold for the basic currency and settlement, Chaumian cash for the retail "bank notes") was inspired by the free banking system of bank notes redeemable on demand for gold at a gold window.

The lesson I drew from that and other aspects of history that the real money in these circumstances was gold -- that is what people wanted at the end of the day. If the gold window closed, the trust-based part of the system collapsed.

Trust and security considerations are far more important than speculations about aggregate human behavior. Psychologists have a hard time making their experiments on individuals repeatable. Macroeconomists speculate about vast numbers of interacting individuals, no repeatability.

High inflation causes savers and creditors large tangible harms, as we see today in Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Argentina, &c. But alleged harms caused by much lower levels of "bad deflation" are very causally remote from monetary decisions -- it's ideological speculation.