Which means two things : a) that my vague theory was indeed correct ; and b) that events rather than people confirmed it, meaning "the people" are forestieri, there's no reason to care "what they have to say" at any point on the grounds of having failed to say correctly when asked in 2015.

Gold (the monetized variety) is discovered. 60 engineers will now employ themselves at digging trenches through the earth, leaving plumbing and doors actually closing to the remaining 40, of which 10 get depressed and die. Queing now runs for 5 years, and people just start shooting each other in line.

Meanwhile, if this magical gold dust is worth the time of 40 of the 100 engineers (really, the only people worth the mention in all of NY) plus the untimely demise of another 10, then it definitely is worth stealing. Currently Fort Knox is not being raided because it's not worth it, not because it's not possible. It's plenty possible, and anyone who can't make it as an engineer would be out there with a rifle, overwhelming what's left of the police (those guys that didn't go to Youkon anyway - speaking of which, "Contempt of court. However, I'm not going to punish you, because we're so short of judges at the moment, what with all of them emigrating to South Africa. I'm going tomorrow; I've got my ticket. Get out there and get some decent sentencing done. Ooh, England makes you sick. Best I can manage here is life imprisonment. It's hardly worth coming in in the morning. Now, South Africa? You've got your cat of nine tails, you've got four death sentences a week, you've got cheap drinks, slave labour and a booming stock market. I'm off, I tell you. Yes, I'm up to here with probation and bleeding psychiatric reports. That's it, I'm off. That's it. Right. But I'm going to have one final fling before I leave, so I sentence you to be burnt at the stake.").

None of which are actually the problem. The main problem is that the virgin's slightly pregnant : once gold market has been manipulated with the worthless government-backed paper "gold" issuances, one can never seriously trust any sort of gold "receipt". Thus the only way to trade gold is physically, at least for a few decades, which absolutely requires the individual use of force (and makes a terrible use of most men's time, patroling their basement with rifle in hand), which arrangmeent makes the state that caused the proiblem an impossibility in the first place anyway.

So in short, gold would be a solution for a problem we have but only in an alternative world where that problem didn't exist. Which...

Note that the gold stuff did make a difference in the long term, which is why a ton of gold today is worth significantly less than a grain in the 1500s. I'm not suggesting it's not likely to survive, I'm merely pointing at the sharks already forming brigades.

So, hypothetically speaking, imagine gold goes to $10,000 an ounce, and suddenly every abandoned mine is now profitable again and production ramps up. So... we get a quadrupling of annual output, which increases the supply by... 6%. What's more, if that same quantity of output is maintained for next year, which isn't easy, the growth in the next year will be less than 6%, since it's now that same quantity divided by 106% of the initial supply. And as time goes on, the growth rate will inevitably decline, because the extra production is being added onto the stockpiles, and the damn yellow thing won't rust or ruin! Compare and contrast with government toilet paper, growing at around 5% only in a good year, and varying anywhere from -15% to +15%. Ideally you'd want your money supply fixed and growing at 0%, but in this classroom of rapidly expanding girls, gold is still the one getting fat slowest, by far.

As to Bitcoin, I have no illusions about the accusations of evil racism and child-hatred that will be leveled at all of us who like its noninflationary nature. But I also don't give a shit, because I can't see this making a difference in the long-run. It isn't the propaganda and accusations of child-hatred that demonetized gold; it was the fascist regimes of FDR, Hitler, Stalin, and the international socialist brotherhood that physically took it from people at gunpoint, banned them from using it, and kept it in store for the service of international socialist criminality and the Dollar. The anti-gold pro-inflation propaganda was the apologia for that, to try to get the raped to think her violation was actually romantic and beautiful. Bitcoin is not gold, and it's not 1934 anymore and nobody is going to collect bitcoin at gunpoint, and criminalizing it won't work. I can't see any inflationary fork surviving for long, and I can't see the blockchain going anywhere. Whatever propaganda comes out, the blockchain will still continue to record transactions and people will still want to use it.

Are you suggesting bitcoin isn't likely to survive till 2025? Why?

"Humans" don't need and shouldn't find themselves in the position where they make judgements, principally because humans by and large are horrible at using the noggin. Reddit is good enough for them, they have the infinite supply of ups and downs and likes and whatnot to spend to their heart's content, let them have that and no more. It's what's adequate and proper.

The notion that gold supply does not increase a lot is predicated on obsolete technology. Gold supply would increase quite a lot, and in really harmful ways involving cyanide, if it seriously became monetized. But that's really a tiny point, there's worse problems with gold.

As to Bitcoin, you will notice that exactly as predicted, the shitgnomes are already attacking its noninflationary nature (for now, trying to inflate the blocksize, just) and as you well observe (as have I for that matter), Bitcoin is pretty inflationary. The notion that the honest network will survive in 2025, once deflation is raping the reddit horde bloody left and right is perhaps far fetched. According to the same self-delusion horde, the side that is going to murder thewm in the current bitcoin fork war is "small but disproportionately vocal". Think about what "putin is a psychopath"-isms will be on the table by 2025, when "evil racist people" refuse to even consider the "inflation is good for everyone" mantra.

I agree with your points in general, but I disagree that currency as a thing may well go away altogether. Even if the role of currency as a store of value and medium of exchange is eliminated to a large degree by the cattle-ification of citizens and the automation of exchange, the role of money as a unit of measure, to allow humans to carry out economic calculation, will never go away unless we completely destroy any semblance of a civilized economy and the division of labor. It will always be essential for people (and I don't include the cattle who have it all worked out for them) to be able to think thoughts like "If I sell 3 extra shirts I can afford a good steak, or two burgers and a salad" and for that to happen, there has got to be a medium of exchange in which shoes, steaks, salads, burgers and everything else has a liquid market where they can quickly be traded for it. Unless all goods are traded constantly in that medium, there cannot be any meaningful prices, and economic calculation will not be possible. And that, in short, is why a money must emerge on the market, and why it can only be one, or very few. It is better to think of money here as the unit of measure, like a meter or inch. Even if you will never actually use a measuring stick physically, you still need to rely on the reference of the meter as a unit throughout your life.

The abomination of multiple national currencies is a destructive artifice of 20th century socialism precisely because it makes economic calculation so difficult. It's like having 100 different measures of length, each of which is elastic; good luck trying to build a house with that. The world economy today is a giant workshop where engineers are working with ever-shifting elastic units of measure—unsurprisingly, so much fail happens everywhere.

Gold has historically been this unit of measure precisely because its quantity does not increase a lot; because annual production is always a tiny fraction of existing stockpiles. This is so because gold does not ruin, and so all the gold ever produced is still piled up as part of the stockpile somewhere out there, which isn't true for any other metal. And because gold cannot be synthetically manufactured, and is very hard to find and produce. This means that global production of gold, every year, only adds about 1.5% to existing stockpiles, and even if by virtue of some miracle production were to double, it would only go up to around 3%. This isn't true for any other metal or asset; everything else is easier to manufacture, and by virtue of ruining and being consumed, its stockpiles are small compared to annual production. For most other things, annual production is around the same order of magnitude as global stockpiles.

This is what has made gold always serve as the best metric for measurement of transactions. Even for a barter transaction that does not involve gold, the exchange terms of the barter are determined by the exchange rate of the two goods against gold. It is this monetary role which gold is still best suited to serve today, because of its predictable quantity and the assurance that its supply can’t be inflated unexpectedly by somebody else. Which brings us to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin today has an annual stockpile growth rate of around 12%, which makes it pretty inflationary for a currency, even worse than trash like the USD and EUR. But this growth rate is fast-dropping, and by 2025 it will drop below that of gold and continue to drop further. But in order for bitcoin to become THE metric for value measurement, everything will have to have a liquid market in bitcoin, which is going to take some time. The old yellow fellow may not be dead quite yet, as it’s had a 10,000 year headstart on bitcoin in setting up liquid markets for things.