The Weimar experience was really bad. Printing presses going 24/7. But the amount they could print was at least limited by the physical constraints of the printing process itself. Today, a central bank can with one keystroke increase the monetary supply by whatever amount it wishes -- $1 billion, $1 trillion, $1 quadrillion... -- in an instant. The amount of gold will never, ever grow faster than the ability of central banks to "print" fiat money. Even if:
Anybody want to bet the entire world's economy that somebody can't develop a method to cheaply extract gold from seawater or convert lead to gold?
In which case gold would no longer serve as a reliable store of wealth. So people would simply move on to another commodity that would.
I quite agree. I was merely responding to the claim that “inflation can’t occur” with a gold-based economy.
It certainly can, although the physical constraints you mention mean it can never get as bad as it can with fiat money.
European countries all thru the middle ages and early modern periods had, sorta, metal-based currencies. When they wanted to inflate, they called in the currency and recoined it, alloying the gold or silver with more base metals. Or they could make the coin smaller while claiming it was still the same coin. The effect either way differed little from printing more paper money.
During most of the Roman Republic coins were almost pure silver. By the time of the Emperor Galerius (260) coins were <5% silver and the empire’s economy was disintegrating.