1142 Ponzi Economics

With more people and more productivity there needs to be more money. Back in the days of gold backing money, 3% more gold a year was mined to approximately match this growth. Even when money was decoupled from gold, the money supply was targeted to grow at 3% a year. In an ideal world, one that existed for decades, things ran relatively smoothly because the math added up but then politicians took the reigns from the economists, and government started printing money connected to no reality. People started getting worried that money wouldn’t be worth anything because the supply was unlimited, hence, Bitcoin appeared. When Bitcoin first came out, there was Bitcoin mining where people could supposedly "mine" Bitcoins by solving mathematical problems on their computers that were designed to increase the number of Bitcoins by 3% a year. With the wimpy computers of the time that worked out but soon people were mining way too many Bitcoins with next-generation hardware, and the mathematical problems had to get ever more complex to limit the growth. Finally, they gave up and arbitrarily said there was enough Bitcoin already to represent all the value in the world and there would be no more unless the value of the world increased. This makes some sense until you consider that there are hundreds of digital currencies like Bitcoin who claim the same thing, none of them back up by anything. People buy Bitcoin to get rich, and if people quit buying it, it would be worthless: a Ponzi scheme so blatant that only time will recognize it.