Chris Olson

Well, within society, unless you want to have a barter economy, you have to have a form of money of some kind.

And money requires certain characteristics in order for it to be good or useful as money.

So you couldn't use sand or seashells.

And in the past, we've used lots of different types of money, like beaver's tails or pelts or tobacco.

Yes.

But with gold, you have something that is durable, it's portable, it's divisible, it's fungible, it's recognizable, it's scarce.

So there can't be enough of it to satisfy everyone's demand.

So it has a certain...

level of value just intrinsic to the characteristics of the element.

And if you were going to look at say the periodic table of elements and figure out which of those is going to be suitable or ideal for money,

The only two that really shine are gold and silver compared to the rest of them.

So over the course of history, it's been a natural progression for societies to adopt gold as a medium of exchange simply because it has those hallmarks and those characteristics that allow it to be useful as a medium of exchange and a store of value.

and it's when you you go away from that that you begin to have the horrible problems in society that that come about through inflation or the artificial creation of credit because when you do that you're you're essentially conveying arbitrary power purchasing power to entities that didn't really earn it so it's a form of counterfeiting to

build on top of that to counterfeit gold or create paper claims or to inflate a currency that's backed by gold.

All of those things are fundamentally lying and they're fundamentally stealing.

And so inflation causes horrible effects within a society that nobody can really diagnose or pin to inflation, but it's really at the root of those things.

And it causes the gradual centralization of power towards those that are able to issue a currency without any tether to reality or to manipulate the rules of the system.

And so, for example...

whoever's closest to new money within a society has more purchasing power than the market expects that they should have because the signals haven't gone out that there's excess money in society so prices don't change and that's ultimately where inflation comes from and over the decades i'm sure that is such an interesting point that i've never considered the people who are closest to new money

That's the real power in it.