Posted on 04/09/2022 8:05:00 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
They’ll be digging up hoards of USB thumb drives that once held bitcoin files, and everyone will wonder who buried them and why they never came back for ‘em. ;^)
Repeat after me boys and girls:
All fiat currencies eventually go to 0.
All of them. Government’s debase the currency to allow more spending. Thus inflation.
Now you understand why gold, silver, and cryptocurrency. They are beyond the power of governments to set a value on them. They cannot be debased.
Perhaps the Romans discovered the benefit of alloying silver with a bit of copper.
True, I am sure.
But the Romans cut the content of the precious metals as the economic times/greed* required, so the amount of silver in this case would fluctuate. This happened numerous times in the republic and later, the empire. By the time of Caracalla, the silver in a denarius was something like 5%.
* Emperors were fond of cutting the silver content so they could pay for lavish spending and paying off the Praetorians and army. More coins at the same value for less actual silver.
That’s correct in my opinion.
10% copper is not debasement. It is for strength and durability.
We do this in other industries as well such as semiconductors and steel. Alloys have always been used to improve characteristics of the pure metal whether its iron, silicon, aluminum, silver, and even gold.
Why are the ridges on the edges of dimes and quarters? Because they were originally intrinsically valuable silver. The ridges made it clear if silver were shaved off the edge.
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