Of course a stock certificate has no intrinsic value - it's value is proportional to the ability of the issuer to redeem the certificate for actual livestock. Gold and other precious metals do have value in and of themselves; we value them for their appearance and physical properties, which are suitable to manufacture of jewelry and (today) certain electronic components, nanoparticles, etc.
As a currency, however, gold and silver have always required a state actor (i.e. "fiat") to guarantee metal content and enforce demand through taxation. This fact was made especially clear in the early Middle Ages. After the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West, gold coins (the solidus and triente) virtually disappeared from Europe, with silver denarii arising only as regional governments gained sufficient strength to enforce taxes. At first, these taxes would be paid "in kind" (essentially, food - the "in kind" produce of the land). Subsequently, taxes would be collected in coin, but only after the government had begun minting them and distributing them into the hands of citizenry.
Even during the "free minting" period, the value of currency vis-a-vis raw metal was determined via the mint fee and seniorage; free mints were free as in speech (if you had silver), rather than beer.
One important qualification is the low labor productivity at that time. The vulnerability to famine which obtains when the average worker produces just 1.8 person-years of food per year creates a high bar to any potential currency.
I highly recommend Peter Spufford's Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, which goes into insane-but-captivating detail on the above issues. It's an essential read if you want to understand the nature of pure fiat, metal-backed (convertible, less than 100% coverage) and metal-based (coins = weight of metal) currencies, and what features are shared by all three currency regimes.
They could actually delete the file, at least, even if they have to save one for some reason. I have no idea what the Android camera API is like, maybe they wanted to avoid requiring a certain permission?
It's not like mining bitcoin is free. If I'm going to give away my spare Joules and cycles, it wont as profit to some random guys. Even contributing to key cracking projects is better than that.
Whether or not it should be considered fraud on an ethical basis, for it to be prosecuted there should be a law against it. The government should not be able to invoke inapplicable laws just because whatever happened was "wrong."
He read reference material for Java during the trial, but had been using other language for years. Here's Alsup:
I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?
Krugman thinks QE is inflationary, as does Bernanke, despite all evidence to the contrary. Their positions on QE are well known, though apparently not to you.
Now look, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call it a duck. Reserves and securities are both non-convertible, dollar-denominated financial assets which represent public debts, earn interest and which can be used to make purchases. If you swap one for the other, the only possible effect on the money supply is via the difference in the interest rates. Securities pay higher interest, ergo swapping them for reserves can only reduce the net financial assets of the private sector.
Are bald assertions to the contrary all you have? Obviously, no one is paying you to forecast inflation.
Clearly, your definition of "private" includes an armed church which levied tithes as well as legally immune feudatories who, yes, controlled armies and levied taxes. The monetarii of the Middle Ages were counts and bishops, not free mansi or merchants.
You can make up as many rationalizations as you want, but the archaeological fact is that gold was extremely scarce in Europe by the 700's, primarily due to balance of trade. For a time, the Europeans were able to trade slaves east to Byzantium and Arabia in exchange for gold, and indeed except for Byzantine nomismata (solidii) and Arabian mancusii (dinars), themselves scarce, there were essentially no gold coins in Europe.
Coinage didn't take off in a big way in Europe until after the tenth century, when the silver penny (denarius) became widespread. At one time, there were as many as 500 independently operating currencies within Western Europe, each stamped by a particular mint. These did not trade at unity; since common folk could not assay metals, a putative silver (or gold) coin was worth only the trust given to the name or sign stamped upon it.
Your claims about Ireland are a bit absurd. The many feudal lords and the church all exerted significant "state" authority in Ireland during the MiddleAges, including the power to tax. Many of the medieval mints in Western Europe were operated by the church, which was no less a government then was the Carolingian Empire.
If you want to read about classical growth theories which actually have predictive capacity (unlike those you follow, which predict equalization of income across all counties) I suggest you read Robert Lucas. That's actually not entry level material though, and multivariable calculus is required.
Sorry, but even a cursory study of history reveals that there has never been a currency other than informal debt systems without the imposition of state authority. Gold has no special value; unless governments are collecting taxes in gold, rather than "in kind" (i.e. as land output), gold coins are not used for transactions. Indeed, why would medieval farmers producing ~1.8 person-years of food per year, accept gold, unless they can use to pay taxes or others are already accepting it? I recommend Peter Spufford's Money and its Use in Medieval Europe - check it out from the library and make your own conclusions, but don't just assert ideological conclusions as facts.
If physical capital grows while the money base does not, then the money supply is decreasing. The absolute amount of money may be unchanged, but the effective amount goes down. The result is worse and worse income inequality in a context of ever higher interest rates (interbank and treasury). Eventually, currency availability is insufficient for everyday use and economic agents revert to barter, informal debts or form new currencies which are weak enough to be useful. This process is exactly what led to the decline of gold as a medium of exchange in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.
Gold is a fiat "currency" (actually, it is a commodity like any other, desired only because of its uses). There has never been a gold coinage which has been widely accepted without some form of state authority. A clear example of the failure of gold-based currencies is found in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages (c. 700 AD); not only was gold refused as payment when taxation ceased, but when coinage became more widespread once more (silver denarii, c. 1000) the people were constantly switching currencies in order to follow the trusted sources of authority. Moneyers who came under the sway of "immunists," feudal lords who had one exemptions from the crown, saw their coinages abandoned.
Gold-backed, rather than gold-based, currencies require an even greater involvement of state authority. The "backing" invariably consists of a government guarantee (indeed, since Sumerians first used gold-backed bronze coins), thus the government gains control of the coverage ratio.
With respect to savings and investment, you must dissave money in order to acquire physical capital. If your investments still get to count as money, well, that is private sector leverage right there. It's fine as long as private sector leverage can increase - but of course this leverage is exactly what leads to inflationary bubble markets. The problem with the neoclassical view is exactly that the neoclassical model you implicitly espouse does not differentiate savings and investment.
It is flat-out impossible for all of us to save more financial assets than we spend. Government debt issuance directly funds the savings desires of the private sector. If the government does not issue new debt / money, the quantity of private sector savings cannot increase - except via increased bank leverage. The assumption that all savings is investment is wrong; whatever is invested is by definition not saved.
Deflation is bad because wages and some other prices have downwards nominal rigidity (it's hard to cut wages). If products are getting cheaper, labor has to get cheaper, too, or else people are going to get laid off. This is a problem for us, because we want these people to support themselves via private sector job markets.
If you want to understand gold-based and gold-backed currencies (different things obviously), you should read a bit about how such currencies functioned in ancient Rome and ancient Sumeria, and during the Middle Ages, and before the industrial revolution. There is a reason why European countries would often rapidly switch between gold and silver standards, and there is a reason why all advanced countries had to quit the gold standard. Ultimately, the quantity of gold could not keep up with private sector savings desires, so new forms of money based on government debt were developed in order to satisfy those desires. Financial constraints imposed via monetary policy hardly require gold - look at today's Euro, the Volcker Shock, etc.
The "debt" is the number of securities that have been issued. Unlike actual borrowing, in which new money is created via leverage, federal bond issues constitute an asset swap between interest bearing assets. The rate on reserves (dollars) is 0.25% and the rate on bonds is a bit higher, currently ~1 to 3%. The more we (the private sector) want to save (i.e. have these higher interest bearing assets or savings accounts, instead of non-interest bearing checking accounts) the more debt the government must issue to satisfy that demand.
The key aspect of this debt is that the government has to issue it for us to save. The total leverage of the money system is not increased by this debt, because you buy 1$ in securities for 1$ in reserves.
However, bank lending does increase leverage. This is due to fractional reserve lending. Essentially the bank loans you some money, which you store in the bank, so then the bank loans that money to me as well. Since "loans create deposits" they (the private banks) are actually creating new money through this process. When the banks are allowed to hugely expand in this way, we get (private) credit bubbles which explode like the ones in 1929, 2001 and 2008. The idea behind capital controls is to limit this private credit expansion. Banks try to get around these controls through fraud, so we need good regulators who can prevent them from taking advantage of us, by lending us too much of this "fake" money.
Back to the money printing thing. Yes, it can devalue the currency. Devaluation is always better than default. Devaluation can even be good - it would boost exports and manufacturing and create jobs through increased international competitiveness. Money printing also does not always cause devaluation. For example, at the present time there is mass unemployment as businesses and individuals struggle to pay down their (private sector) debts, owed to the banks. Money printing now will help these entities pay down debts, and will lead to more employment at the same prices, instead of increasing prices. Once we have full employment (~3.5% unemployment) again, then we have to stop money printing, or we will get inflation. Print money during a depression, unprint money during the boom.
Unprint money?! Yes, in fact this is what taxes do, and if inflation is too high the government can counteract it by raising taxes.
TL;DR: public debt is needed for private assets to exist (as long as these assets are measured with money, which is itself a public debt), while private bank debt increases leverage and can cause hyperinflated credit bubbles if it is unregulated.
Oh, and by the way, after the credit downgrade the US Treasury rate went down. You may believe the corrupt rating agencies, but I believe in the determination of the free market (at least when it comes to price levels).
You aren't thinking this through. Under our system, the money you and I have are the governments debts. If those debts are erased, our money is erased. If we are to have more money in the future, the government has to "borrow" more. But this "borrowing" is not like one of us taking out a loan, it just constitutes a new issue of paper money.
Furthermore, a government which issues and borrows in its own currency, as the US does, can never fail to pay its bills. It is the sole issuer of the currency, and it can never "run out."
In order to have price stability in a growing economy (or with growing population) the government must issue new debt/money over time.
Depositors at the Fed are other banks, local and foreign governments, etc. To conduct QE, the Fed marks up a depositor's reserve account (0.25% interest) and marks down the security account (a bit higher interest rate) by the same amount.
The "QE money" comes from their securities/savings accounts. Again, securities are money. Like money, the securities represent a government debt. Like money, the securities are highly liquid and can be used to make purchases.
Operationally, securities are exactly the same as a savings account. If I get money which I don't want to spend, I put it in my savings account. This represents a liability or debt of the bank to me, but if I decide to spend the money, I just transfer it back to my checking account, and the bank liability is redeemed. With QE, it's as if the bank is forcing me to make this transfer. My net financial assets are unchanged, but my interest income is reduced. Therefore, QE is deflationary to the extent that those interest payments (which really are new money) would have been inflationary.
The final point is all the interest payments that get made to the Fed (now that they own all these securities) get handed over in turn to the Treasury. This reduces the federal deficit; essentially, it's a tax on savers' interest income.
So QE has these effects: 1) reduce private sector interest income, 2) encourage further bond buying and lower the Treasury rate (thus slowing increase of federal debt), 3) reduce interbank rate IFF there are creditworthy projects to invest in, 4) encourage purchases of interest bearing assets (hey look, a stock market rally) and finally 5) reduce federal deficit (increase revenue by same amount as in pt. 1.).
But, I think, only if the object is found to be one piece of rock. If it's loosely bound, the pieces could scatter but maintain their Earth oriented trajectories.
So your argument is that only Nazi's provide social insurance?
Look, when there is high inflation, you spend your money, as much and as quickly as possible (Weimar workers would get paid daily before work and go shopping immediately). The producers of real goods therefore rake in tons of money - which they also must re-invest as quickly as possible. Thus inflation can play an important role in recovery from a demand shock.
My quip about SI was just to say that if the government had engaged in further redistribution during this period, it might have been less traumatic for workers, who might then have been less receptive to Hitler's message of German empowerment. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to pull off, as the French were occupying industrial areas to collect reparations in real goods. The point about the Rentenbank is that the hyperinflation was actually stopped over a period of just a few months as the new, stable, land-backed currency was introduced. Actually, the economic stabilization did force Hitler's reformed Nazi Party to obtain power via existing political structures rather than violent overthrow, as they had planned initially. But - still not relevant to the effects and resolution of the inflationary episode.
So redemption of that debt can't result in real resources being removed to other countries.
The trade "deficit" means we are trading fancy pieces of paper for other countries' real resources and labor. I do not share the insane preference for paper over actual wealth.
I'm sorry, I think you are responding without reading. Bitcoin is certainly designed so that a certain amount of computation is needed to produce 1 bitcoin, but that in no way implies that a bitcoin is worth exactly the same as the cost of production, even immediately after it is produced.
Even gold coins were nearly worthless (in Western/central Europe) during the early Middle Ages, due to various factors including the extremely low productivity of labor, the lack of state authority after the decline of the Western Empire, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course a stock certificate has no intrinsic value - it's value is proportional to the ability of the issuer to redeem the certificate for actual livestock. Gold and other precious metals do have value in and of themselves; we value them for their appearance and physical properties, which are suitable to manufacture of jewelry and (today) certain electronic components, nanoparticles, etc.
As a currency, however, gold and silver have always required a state actor (i.e. "fiat") to guarantee metal content and enforce demand through taxation. This fact was made especially clear in the early Middle Ages. After the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West, gold coins (the solidus and triente) virtually disappeared from Europe, with silver denarii arising only as regional governments gained sufficient strength to enforce taxes. At first, these taxes would be paid "in kind" (essentially, food - the "in kind" produce of the land). Subsequently, taxes would be collected in coin, but only after the government had begun minting them and distributing them into the hands of citizenry.
Even during the "free minting" period, the value of currency vis-a-vis raw metal was determined via the mint fee and seniorage; free mints were free as in speech (if you had silver), rather than beer.
One important qualification is the low labor productivity at that time. The vulnerability to famine which obtains when the average worker produces just 1.8 person-years of food per year creates a high bar to any potential currency.
I highly recommend Peter Spufford's Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, which goes into insane-but-captivating detail on the above issues. It's an essential read if you want to understand the nature of pure fiat, metal-backed (convertible, less than 100% coverage) and metal-based (coins = weight of metal) currencies, and what features are shared by all three currency regimes.
They could actually delete the file, at least, even if they have to save one for some reason. I have no idea what the Android camera API is like, maybe they wanted to avoid requiring a certain permission?
It's not like mining bitcoin is free. If I'm going to give away my spare Joules and cycles, it wont as profit to some random guys. Even contributing to key cracking projects is better than that.
Whether or not it should be considered fraud on an ethical basis, for it to be prosecuted there should be a law against it. The government should not be able to invoke inapplicable laws just because whatever happened was "wrong."
I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?
Judge Alsup is also a coder - and that's why he knew how trivial the 9 lines of RangeCheck() were.
Krugman thinks QE is inflationary, as does Bernanke, despite all evidence to the contrary. Their positions on QE are well known, though apparently not to you.
Now look, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call it a duck. Reserves and securities are both non-convertible, dollar-denominated financial assets which represent public debts, earn interest and which can be used to make purchases. If you swap one for the other, the only possible effect on the money supply is via the difference in the interest rates. Securities pay higher interest, ergo swapping them for reserves can only reduce the net financial assets of the private sector.
Are bald assertions to the contrary all you have? Obviously, no one is paying you to forecast inflation.
Clearly, your definition of "private" includes an armed church which levied tithes as well as legally immune feudatories who, yes, controlled armies and levied taxes. The monetarii of the Middle Ages were counts and bishops, not free mansi or merchants.
You can make up as many rationalizations as you want, but the archaeological fact is that gold was extremely scarce in Europe by the 700's, primarily due to balance of trade. For a time, the Europeans were able to trade slaves east to Byzantium and Arabia in exchange for gold, and indeed except for Byzantine nomismata (solidii) and Arabian mancusii (dinars), themselves scarce, there were essentially no gold coins in Europe.
Coinage didn't take off in a big way in Europe until after the tenth century, when the silver penny (denarius) became widespread. At one time, there were as many as 500 independently operating currencies within Western Europe, each stamped by a particular mint. These did not trade at unity; since common folk could not assay metals, a putative silver (or gold) coin was worth only the trust given to the name or sign stamped upon it.
Your claims about Ireland are a bit absurd. The many feudal lords and the church all exerted significant "state" authority in Ireland during the Middle Ages, including the power to tax. Many of the medieval mints in Western Europe were operated by the church, which was no less a government then was the Carolingian Empire.
If you want to read about classical growth theories which actually have predictive capacity (unlike those you follow, which predict equalization of income across all counties) I suggest you read Robert Lucas. That's actually not entry level material though, and multivariable calculus is required.
Sorry, but even a cursory study of history reveals that there has never been a currency other than informal debt systems without the imposition of state authority. Gold has no special value; unless governments are collecting taxes in gold, rather than "in kind" (i.e. as land output), gold coins are not used for transactions. Indeed, why would medieval farmers producing ~1.8 person-years of food per year, accept gold, unless they can use to pay taxes or others are already accepting it? I recommend Peter Spufford's Money and its Use in Medieval Europe - check it out from the library and make your own conclusions, but don't just assert ideological conclusions as facts.
If physical capital grows while the money base does not, then the money supply is decreasing. The absolute amount of money may be unchanged, but the effective amount goes down. The result is worse and worse income inequality in a context of ever higher interest rates (interbank and treasury). Eventually, currency availability is insufficient for everyday use and economic agents revert to barter, informal debts or form new currencies which are weak enough to be useful. This process is exactly what led to the decline of gold as a medium of exchange in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.
Gold is a fiat "currency" (actually, it is a commodity like any other, desired only because of its uses). There has never been a gold coinage which has been widely accepted without some form of state authority. A clear example of the failure of gold-based currencies is found in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages (c. 700 AD); not only was gold refused as payment when taxation ceased, but when coinage became more widespread once more (silver denarii, c. 1000) the people were constantly switching currencies in order to follow the trusted sources of authority. Moneyers who came under the sway of "immunists," feudal lords who had one exemptions from the crown, saw their coinages abandoned.
Gold-backed, rather than gold-based, currencies require an even greater involvement of state authority. The "backing" invariably consists of a government guarantee (indeed, since Sumerians first used gold-backed bronze coins), thus the government gains control of the coverage ratio.
With respect to savings and investment, you must dissave money in order to acquire physical capital. If your investments still get to count as money, well, that is private sector leverage right there. It's fine as long as private sector leverage can increase - but of course this leverage is exactly what leads to inflationary bubble markets. The problem with the neoclassical view is exactly that the neoclassical model you implicitly espouse does not differentiate savings and investment.
It is flat-out impossible for all of us to save more financial assets than we spend. Government debt issuance directly funds the savings desires of the private sector. If the government does not issue new debt / money, the quantity of private sector savings cannot increase - except via increased bank leverage. The assumption that all savings is investment is wrong; whatever is invested is by definition not saved.
Deflation is bad because wages and some other prices have downwards nominal rigidity (it's hard to cut wages). If products are getting cheaper, labor has to get cheaper, too, or else people are going to get laid off. This is a problem for us, because we want these people to support themselves via private sector job markets.
If you want to understand gold-based and gold-backed currencies (different things obviously), you should read a bit about how such currencies functioned in ancient Rome and ancient Sumeria, and during the Middle Ages, and before the industrial revolution. There is a reason why European countries would often rapidly switch between gold and silver standards, and there is a reason why all advanced countries had to quit the gold standard. Ultimately, the quantity of gold could not keep up with private sector savings desires, so new forms of money based on government debt were developed in order to satisfy those desires. Financial constraints imposed via monetary policy hardly require gold - look at today's Euro, the Volcker Shock, etc.
The "debt" is the number of securities that have been issued. Unlike actual borrowing, in which new money is created via leverage, federal bond issues constitute an asset swap between interest bearing assets. The rate on reserves (dollars) is 0.25% and the rate on bonds is a bit higher, currently ~1 to 3%. The more we (the private sector) want to save (i.e. have these higher interest bearing assets or savings accounts, instead of non-interest bearing checking accounts) the more debt the government must issue to satisfy that demand.
The key aspect of this debt is that the government has to issue it for us to save. The total leverage of the money system is not increased by this debt, because you buy 1$ in securities for 1$ in reserves.
However, bank lending does increase leverage. This is due to fractional reserve lending. Essentially the bank loans you some money, which you store in the bank, so then the bank loans that money to me as well. Since "loans create deposits" they (the private banks) are actually creating new money through this process. When the banks are allowed to hugely expand in this way, we get (private) credit bubbles which explode like the ones in 1929, 2001 and 2008. The idea behind capital controls is to limit this private credit expansion. Banks try to get around these controls through fraud, so we need good regulators who can prevent them from taking advantage of us, by lending us too much of this "fake" money.
Back to the money printing thing. Yes, it can devalue the currency. Devaluation is always better than default. Devaluation can even be good - it would boost exports and manufacturing and create jobs through increased international competitiveness. Money printing also does not always cause devaluation. For example, at the present time there is mass unemployment as businesses and individuals struggle to pay down their (private sector) debts, owed to the banks. Money printing now will help these entities pay down debts, and will lead to more employment at the same prices, instead of increasing prices. Once we have full employment (~3.5% unemployment) again, then we have to stop money printing, or we will get inflation. Print money during a depression, unprint money during the boom.
Unprint money?! Yes, in fact this is what taxes do, and if inflation is too high the government can counteract it by raising taxes.
TL;DR: public debt is needed for private assets to exist (as long as these assets are measured with money, which is itself a public debt), while private bank debt increases leverage and can cause hyperinflated credit bubbles if it is unregulated.
Oh, and by the way, after the credit downgrade the US Treasury rate went down. You may believe the corrupt rating agencies, but I believe in the determination of the free market (at least when it comes to price levels).
You aren't thinking this through. Under our system, the money you and I have are the governments debts. If those debts are erased, our money is erased. If we are to have more money in the future, the government has to "borrow" more. But this "borrowing" is not like one of us taking out a loan, it just constitutes a new issue of paper money.
Furthermore, a government which issues and borrows in its own currency, as the US does, can never fail to pay its bills. It is the sole issuer of the currency, and it can never "run out."
In order to have price stability in a growing economy (or with growing population) the government must issue new debt/money over time.
Public sector debt comprises the private sector assets. That's our system.
OK, so your position is that the net financial (dollar denominated) assets (which are equal to the government's liabilities) should go down...
The time has come...to leave again...give out the word, abandon Earth. Activate the Noah Plan!
Depositors at the Fed are other banks, local and foreign governments, etc. To conduct QE, the Fed marks up a depositor's reserve account (0.25% interest) and marks down the security account (a bit higher interest rate) by the same amount.
The "QE money" comes from their securities/savings accounts. Again, securities are money. Like money, the securities represent a government debt. Like money, the securities are highly liquid and can be used to make purchases.
Operationally, securities are exactly the same as a savings account. If I get money which I don't want to spend, I put it in my savings account. This represents a liability or debt of the bank to me, but if I decide to spend the money, I just transfer it back to my checking account, and the bank liability is redeemed. With QE, it's as if the bank is forcing me to make this transfer. My net financial assets are unchanged, but my interest income is reduced. Therefore, QE is deflationary to the extent that those interest payments (which really are new money) would have been inflationary.
The final point is all the interest payments that get made to the Fed (now that they own all these securities) get handed over in turn to the Treasury. This reduces the federal deficit; essentially, it's a tax on savers' interest income.
So QE has these effects: 1) reduce private sector interest income, 2) encourage further bond buying and lower the Treasury rate (thus slowing increase of federal debt), 3) reduce interbank rate IFF there are creditworthy projects to invest in, 4) encourage purchases of interest bearing assets (hey look, a stock market rally) and finally 5) reduce federal deficit (increase revenue by same amount as in pt. 1.).
But, I think, only if the object is found to be one piece of rock. If it's loosely bound, the pieces could scatter but maintain their Earth oriented trajectories.
Sir Arthur Clarke proposed detonating a large nuclear device in space, to light up asteroids with the radio burst.
Probably easier to use a mass driver from the moon.
So your argument is that only Nazi's provide social insurance?
Look, when there is high inflation, you spend your money, as much and as quickly as possible (Weimar workers would get paid daily before work and go shopping immediately). The producers of real goods therefore rake in tons of money - which they also must re-invest as quickly as possible. Thus inflation can play an important role in recovery from a demand shock.
My quip about SI was just to say that if the government had engaged in further redistribution during this period, it might have been less traumatic for workers, who might then have been less receptive to Hitler's message of German empowerment. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to pull off, as the French were occupying industrial areas to collect reparations in real goods. The point about the Rentenbank is that the hyperinflation was actually stopped over a period of just a few months as the new, stable, land-backed currency was introduced. Actually, the economic stabilization did force Hitler's reformed Nazi Party to obtain power via existing political structures rather than violent overthrow, as they had planned initially. But - still not relevant to the effects and resolution of the inflationary episode.
So redemption of that debt can't result in real resources being removed to other countries.
The trade "deficit" means we are trading fancy pieces of paper for other countries' real resources and labor. I do not share the insane preference for paper over actual wealth.
I'm sorry, I think you are responding without reading. Bitcoin is certainly designed so that a certain amount of computation is needed to produce 1 bitcoin, but that in no way implies that a bitcoin is worth exactly the same as the cost of production, even immediately after it is produced.
Even gold coins were nearly worthless (in Western/central Europe) during the early Middle Ages, due to various factors including the extremely low productivity of labor, the lack of state authority after the decline of the Western Empire, etc.