[arthurus]

It has ended at the beginnings of wars because governments nearly always inflate during war. Linclon did it during his war. In wartime governments must spend much more than they think they can reaise in taxes and sooner than tmore taxes can be evied and collected so they borrow and inflate the currency in order to at least parially default- repay with smaller dollars. Lincoln's war saw about 100% inflation and was followed bya postwat deflation as the government went back to the previous gold standard. With a proper god standard, the money is either gold/redeemable in gold or the central bank is tasked with keeping the price of gold stable. Gold value is always stable and declines only when there is a major ađition to the world's stock of gold as happened with the 1849+ gold discoveries, but that was only a very small change and is highly unlikely to happen again. It is not gold that is unstable, it is the government money that is unstable and will be so long as government uses inflation to default on its debts.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Whatever the theoretical faults of paper money the reality is that it has financed the most massive expansion of the World economy in history. Standards of living are at unparalleled levels for unparalleled numbers of people. There is insufficient gold to provide the liquidity necessary to allow that growth to have reached current levels and insufficient to maintain it. Yap coins would be little different than gold.