I agree that Trump is once again guilty of treason.

It's New Zealand you Muppet. We don't use pounds.

I don't get this opposition. You'd do something else, wouldn't you? Why would you consider always going to the lowest common denominator just because someone might have a flip phone?

If the options are "rely on an app", "don't rely on an app", and you can't do the first because your phone can't do that for whatever reason, you fall back to the second. But if you can do the first in a particular case and it works better for that case, why wouldn't you? It's wrong to use the better solution as a last resort, it's better to use the best solution that is available to the situation.

In terms of value, tax revenue did grow by 10%; in terms of total money supply, it stayed steady (remember I said that 100% of the money in supply was already active for simplicity's sake). The math is all actually much simpler when dealing with fixed money supply.

Gold is great. It just has a few flaws:

• - Hard to divide below certain amounts. Impractical for micropayments when used directly.
• - Hard to transfer large amounts physically.
• - Hard to secure physically.
• - Supply isn't completely fixed or known due to the limitations of our knowledge of what's available, and potential future asteroid mining.
• - Gold isn't indestructible due to being physical (it's very robust and that's great, but not completely so).

When used indirectly to try to get around these problems, (e.g. gold backed dollars), new problems spring up due to the ridiculous level of trust required in the institutions who are "looking after" the gold:

• - They can lie about reserves and debase the value in secret. This is hard to measure or notice until it's far too late.
• - They can stop electronic transactions they deem as 'undesirable' ("use of money" == "communication of value" therefore "governmental restrictions on use of money" == "governmental intervention in free speech"; something I'm strongly against)
• - There are central points of failure with control over vast amounts of value which are juicy targets for malicious actors (in the modern age of digital use of money vastly outstripping physical, reserve holders for a gold-backed dollar would be the world's most attacked computer systems by a long long stretch).

So, what's needed is a purely non-physical asset with the same positive monetary properties as gold but without the above negative properties that make it impractical in the modern world without resorting to the different set of problems introduced when using proxies like gold backed dollars. That way, you don't need to have a currency "backed" by the asset, but can instead use it directly. For the Happylandians in my silly little story, that's Joycoin. For us here in the real world, it's Bitcoin.

Just for full disclosure of anyone else reading this: I screwed up the inflation maths in my original comment since I did it based on population growth instead of economic growth. It doesn't actually change the result though, just the exact numbers that are there.