Topic: Over the Past 300 Years, No Fiat Money Has Escaped Going to 0 (Read 451 times)

If it was that simple then no one will be worried but we know that is simply not true, when a fiat currency goes to zero or it approximates that value then there is an enormous amount of suffering, people lose their jobs and the few things they were able to accumulate in decades of hard work and all of that is erased just because governments could not keep themselves from printing more currency.

And what it is even worse is that even if they know this if people try an alternative path like adopting gold or even bitcoin then governments try to ban those options, which show us they only care about their own privileges and their own survival and they do not care about their citizens at all.

Well, what happens when it goes to zero? It simply gets a reset by the governments and everyone continue on like normal. The eventual end of national currencies are not a big deal anymore, they find excuses and they find innovative ways to "reboot" it, like the US Dollar when it was backed by Gold.

Governments like Zimbabwe just turned to the next Fiat currencies and piggy backed on it to survive and once that fails, they will just latch onto the next reserve currency that survived. 

indeed bitcoin cannot be counterfeited like gold, where there is no definite supply and the amount is increasing every day. however, because gold is a recognized precious metal, it has been used as the standard for printing fiat currencies to date. and to remember in this case the government can manage everything

Nobody alive has ever experienced that type of devaluation because nobody lives long enough to experience it.  It's disingenuous to cite how much the dollar has depreciated since 1913 because nobody alive currently had money in 1913 and so nobody has experienced the rates you cite. Further, nobody holds significant savings in fiat currency anyway, it's held in investment classes that actually produce returns, so even over decades of living with a devaluing dollar, nobody experiences the full inflation rate in their lifetimes.  Both of these facts together render the inflation issue as grossly overstated by crypto enthusiasts.

All them worthless fiat money can be collector item too.

Which is why in the rest of my post I said that such a thing was very unlikely, however as I said the gold standard will maybe make a comeback but it is useless, backing paper currency with gold may seem like a good option but governments will always try to cheat the gold standard, that is what happened many years ago and it will happen again if it is implemented.

This is why the only option for those that support gold is that we use the precious metal directly but even that is unlikely as it is better to use something like bitcoin that can be carried surreptitiously and cannot be counterfeited like gold.

There are actually a few fiat currencies that lost it value so that simply means that any fiat currency could possibly drop its value to zero. There's no standard value so anything could happen anytime. There's no stability even in fiat though it's a necessity for us to survive.

Gold system and generation is gone and gone for good. If gold is to be used for money, this will lead to impoverishing of the masses because gold is used as measurement of riches. Therefore it is out of the reach of masses.


I think I know that fiat can be devalued either by the government intentionally or by the economic failure in the society but to go back to zero surely means no importance, relevance of governance because fiat is the strength of government which is the reason of the struggle not to accept bitcoin and cryptocurrency because it doesn't give control to few people in government but to the masses.

I agree on this, the gold standard is also a scam because this is done to generate confidence on the paper currency being issued by the government and once that trust is there they begin to withdraw their support to the gold standard and we are left once again with a fiat currency, if at some point we are going to back to gold we need to use gold directly and go back to the old days of carrying gold in our pockets.

But I think that is very unlikely which is why I think bitcoin is going to be the money of choice of the new generations because you can carry your bitcoin with you very easily and make instantaneous transactions all over the world with just a few clicks.

I don't the issue is about people losing trust, it is about what is available to transact with,  fiat is the universally accepted currency to trade with, and since there is no universally accepted alternative just yet, people will continue to use it whether they loss trust in it or not,

Gold can be a good alternative but it is not so available to the reach of everyone, people trust gold and place a high value to it, but it is rare and not everyone can have access to it and even the government will face challenges making it a mode of transaction.

But the point here is that even if the statement made by OP is false strictly speaking, the tendency of any fiat currency is going to 0. Both the Pound and the USD have lost more than 99% of their value and they keep going down. So they haven't reached zero yet but they are on their way to.

Well done, the Pound has indeed been around for hundreds of years and never gone to zero. OP also ignores all the currencies in use currently that have not gone to zero. The USD has been around for over 220 years as well and depreciates slowly and intentionally and it's worked well for a long time.

I guess it's just the way of life to tell us how measly money is compared to much more important things in this planet. Although of course, in the current society we live in, money is forcibly integrated into every sector making it very hard for people without money to fit and live a content life in the current state of the planet. Then again, this is what cryptocurrencies are for, let's just hope for the best and believe that this will not happen to crypto.

The thing about pound back then and pound now (well about almost each money historically and today) is the fact that today's problem lies within the capitalist system making its own decision to grow bigger in numbers to show the world it is profiting while destroying the worth of money.

Wealthy people would rather print 10 trillion dollars, give 9 trillion of it to rich people, and 1 trillion to poor people so they can spend on places rich people have and gain that 1 trillion as well, and make their money worthless basically however they will be capable of showing increasing profits on their shareholder meeting. That's literally it, as long as companies can show that they have made billions in profit, they are fine that those billions worth less money than few million hundred years ago, they do not care about the power of their money, they only care about what they have.

Fair point. This piqued my interest and I realized for the first time that the British pound has been around since 1209. On Statista there is a statistic about how the value of the pound has changed from then to now.


Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031884/value-pound-sterling-since/

The value is indeed close to zero, but probably not quite zero. Interestingly, there was even a period in the late Middle Ages when the pound remained very stable for over 300 years.

I think that Belarusian Ruble counts as a fiat money that has gone to 0 because I watched a Youtube video where they are spotting scammers that are exchanging Belarusian ruble for euros instead of the local currency of Czech Republic with tourists as their main target and they said that the Belarusian ruble is useless and many people fall for that scam. As long as the government in each countries is still standing then the value of fiat will not go down to 0 and the only time that it will happen is when there is a fiat phase out or a total war.

From my own perspective, it not that governments was overconfident about printing of more fiat currency will destroy the economy but they are printing more currency scheduled to the money they are going to gain from it, if thets not the IMF have once advised the minimization of cash printing and the integration of CBDC why are they still adamant? These are what Satoshi sees and he decided to create something for the people rather than the government taking advantage of us.

The Gold standard is just another naive scheme to build people trust on the fiat system once the people are confident, more investors will hop in and there will be no panic.

Really? It is probably the worst kept secret in the history of the world, fiat currencies never work long term, they may seem to do so but governments get overconfident, they think they have finally mastered the art of printing all the money they want without destroying their economies only to discover too late this is not the case.

Now some people may argue that a currency or two are defying those expectations but what they do not understand is that those currencies already fell before and were rescued by going back to the gold standard for a time in order to avoid the complete destruction of the currency and once things were stable then the currencies became fiat again.

I agree that fiat currencies will not be supplanted by anything, including cryptocurrencies. The states tightly control this and will not allow anyone to do this.
The national currencies of states can be subject to varying degrees of inflation, but in principle it cannot fall to zero. After all, it is provided with the material assets of the state that are in circulation. It also cannot become useless due to the development of new technologies. In any case, I do not know of such examples.

I get that fiat has to deal with inflation and that's why many fiat currencies bankrupted back in the day, and we have our current system which is making it harder and harder to live, because money is printed constantly to keep the rich rich and keep the poor not dying, and that is why I think it is going to end up with something terrible with the current ones we have.

However realize that all the gods that we "used" to believe are a joke now, Zeus was once believed and worshiped, made statues about him, songs written for him, and now it is a joke and I do not think that anyone left to believe him, doesn't mean current religion will be gone as well. That is why I think governments will do whatever it takes to keep their currency going high, that is what we are going to face with, there is really nothing left to do but save because if not they are going to end up worse than anyone in history since this fiat bubble got so high.

I don't think that after billions of dollars being input into the crypto currency every other day it will have zero value? The asset to become zero means the money will be taken out of the market. I don't see any point when trillions of worth market would be withdrawn from the blockchain just like that. Moreover, there are rising number of the crypto institutional and billionaire investors who would want it to go upwards only. I believe that many government authorities are also onto it to send the anonymous transactions. Half of the cases are coming from gangsters too. So much money flooding in the market and you think it will ever go rogue? Not sure!

This is simply wrong.The US dollar and the euro have never gone to zero.They might become close to worthless in the future,but that is highly unlikely to happen,due to their status of a legal tender.Their value can never become zero,but it will decrease for sure.The governments/central banks of the western world will never get rid of their favorite tools.
The article seems to be wishful thinking by a cryptocurrency maximalist.

Not just third world country although they are the most prevalent, take USA for example, currently they are printing a lot for the stimulus package. The only way to fix it is to curtail inflation and make the spending as much as possible tight, frugal and practical because with useless funding the money goes to waste which means that they will have to get more money because they have spent it on something stupid. Fiat is backed up by the government and in a strange way gold still holds it backing towards fiat.

and it's mostly in a third world country that the fiat money becomes hyper inflated and it eventually also become a big pile of useless paper. Our current monetary system is broken and definitely need fix.
Not to mention in the era of Internet we definitely need currecny that's transparent and not just printed paper but backed up by some reserve and that could be anything that's precious + the capability of easy money transfer.

One of the best reason there is to rely on Bitcoin is this. The moment people lose trust on paper money and know it's true value is already too late for regrets. History will repeat and paper money will be less and less time by time until it will go back to it's proper place of use, tissue, for books and newspapers etc.

Fiat will become zero if it is no longer trusted or is no longer used, based on these two possibilities that it hasn't happened now. Therefore, I am sure
that fiat will not become zero, even though as we all know the government has done a lot of printing money. This is causing hyper-inflation in
the near future and will bring down the fiat value, but will not make it zero. I still use fiat every day, so it is impossible for fiat to be zero in my opinion.
Likewise with Bitcoin, it will not be zero as long as there is still supply and demand. Therefore, don't be too anxious about the issue of fiat value
that continues to decline, because I believe the government will not allow fiat to become zero.

Fiat money doesn’t escape to zero because when fiat money became worthless it hyper-inflates and there are a lot of examples from history when fiat money hyper-inflated: Russia, Greece, Belorussia, Zimbabwe, Poland, Mexica, Brazil, Peru, Chili, Ukraine, USA and a lot of other countries at different periods of their history faced hyper-inflation and further denomination of their fiat money. Nevertheless this is the logical beginning of the theme that BTC is the best asset, because it’s finite so can’t hyper-inflate as well as drop to zero because a lot of people invested in it, believe in it and already use it as money.

US dollars and pounds are still better, although not possible for fiat to get to zero, but it can be almost worth zero. Even since some decades ago when some countries were colonized, especially African countries. Taking Nigeria that I know very well as an example, the value of Nigeria naira was stronger than US dollars at the time when they got independence and equal to British Pounds, but otherwise is the case now. Recently, the exchange rate of US dollars to naira is 380, we can see how Naira is almost worth zero if approximated. Some countries fiat currency are even worse as they were more devaluated over the past years. If the strong fiat like Pounds and Dollars are still having such issue, what are we going to refer developing and underdeveloped countries having. That is why it is just conclusive that fiat are not ways to protect someone funds as they are devaluating in design and controlled by the governments, although on purpose.

So to what I think about bitcoin, it is just one of the appreciative assets of today, people that are wise today are really moving towards buying such asset or go for good commodities like good. But as of present, bitcoin has been the most successful asset of last decade and possibly might be the most successful assets of this decade.

Yeah well, strictly speaking it is indeed false. However a pound was worth one pound of silver 300 years ago. Nowadays you only get 0.05 ounces or 0.003125 pounds, which means it has lost more than 99% of its initial value.

This is the first thing I thought when I read the topic title.

I made a brief research and found this:

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/pound-sterling-gbp/

I once read a nice quote, similar to that, made by Chris Dixon:

There's a lot of fiat money that become worthless because of growing technology and of course, central banks are improving the fiat system and that's why many are just part of the history and no value anymore but of course fiat money will remain on our system and it will never be replaced. Many believes that Bitcoin will replace fiat currency, and for me this is just a hype because government will not allow this one and many are still not knowledgeable about bitcoin, so it wont happen in the near future.

I expected that link in the OP to be from zerohedge as soon as I saw the title of this thread--I was wrong, but this is the same argument that goldbugs have been using to hype precious metals for as long as I can remember. 

And I'm sure it's true, because no government has lasted forever and thus there's been no currency that's lasted forever.  But so what?  It's not like there's any guarantee that bitcoin has to hold any value whatsoever, much less be worth $60k/BTC.  Do I think bitcoin is going to go to zero anytime soon?  Nope.  But I also don't expect the US dollar to go to zero in the near future either (though with all this money printing, I'd say it's getting closer and closer as time goes on).

Fiat money can only go to zero if the government fails. We have seen few examples already like Zimbabwe or Somalia or Venezuela. These fiats have nearly went close to zero so they had to adopt different mechanisms like crypto adoption or completely discard their own currencies and adopt a foreign currency. So fiat currency is not out of such risks.

But does that mean crypto can be an alternative? I see this not happening because cryptos are not controlled by any country. So no matter how bad the fiat system is, I don't see them adopting cryptos in any way!

even if it had to return to the intrinsic value of fiat to Zero then the barter system would become commonplace. not only in the past 3 centuries, even in the future fiat is not sure when cryptocurrency is a legal medium of exchange and is used globally. it is only a matter of exchange, both fiat and money in the world of different types and values remain in the same function. So when we look back, the barter system was introduced long before the first century of world warfare. fiat appeared when missionaries discussed in the pyramids of ancient egypt. to give birth to a medium of exchange in the form of banknotes.

Actually they have, frequently they just rebrand the coin as an acknowledgement of that. The fact that it does not reach "absolute zero" is meaningless. In practice "0.00000000000001" is zero and that is happening in Venezuela, about to happen in Turkey and happened no more than a few decades ago in Germany.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zpctyrd/revision/6#:~:text=The%20German%20currency%20lost%20virtually,million%20marks%20by%20November%201923.

The national money of states cannot depreciate to zero, since even with the highest inflation in the country there are material benefits that provide this money.
It is very rare for states to declare a default, but this is more due to the inability of the state to fulfill international financial obligations. Other states prefer not to allow this, as it means that all previous debts of this state must be written off.
Under certain circumstances, a cryptocurrency may well drop to zero in value.

The thing with currencies is that they are not connected to any commodity like gold. So once people lose trust in a fiat currency than the value will go down to 0. The same could happen to any crypto currency. But one good thing of fiat currencies is that even if the money becomes worthless there will be a new currency eventually. And the exchange rate for the new currency shouldn't be 0.

it's still going to be the same if the digital currency in CBDC can be minted all they want. the value will still deflate and goes zero. but our data will be collected with this CBDC which there will be another revolution to be done against it. the wealthy people who govern this world will still be in their full control that even the waters in the river are going to be owned by them.  it's better to still have the cash and cryptocurrency.

Fiat money is simply a symbol of belief. As long as there are people who believe in fiat, it will still have value. Just imagine that if bitcoin is not reliable and no one trusts it, its value will remain zero. Everything in this world is impermanent. It can change, reshape, return to its most basic form, or even vanish from this world. But from my point of view, even though many people disagree with the benefit of fiat money, other parts of the world still concern fiat as an important tool for a variety of aspects. And since the world has flattened and become the only part, fiat even plays a more important role.

The existence of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are created in order to against not just the government but also inflation which is an intrinsic characteristic of cash. And with this new alteration, people will have more choices but it is not necessary that this new form of money will replace or destroy fiat. From my perspective, they will co-exist in this mad world and together, they will bring a lot of advantages and innovations to humankind.

Be flexible guys. Both fiat and cryptos have their own strength and weakness

When government doesn't use fiat money as legal tender, fiat money will going to zero.

But right now, I find it quite impossible fiat money can going into zero because we're using it for daily and every time to buy food. In the future government will began to develop digital currency of central bank (CBDC) it also backed with real fiat money 1:1 , the difference is only digital. Many traditional bank would collapse from this, but not all.

Even fiat money will lose it value due to inflationary as government keep printing new money to cover its debt, we still need it to pay micro payment and anything.

Bitcoin is the future, but it can't replaced fiat money. IMO we will use digital coin backed with fiat money in the future since government has full control and support it.

Fiat doesn't work that way though, it loses its value via inflation and if we consider it as going zero, I think that I can name a few that did that, there is the Deutsche Mark during World War 2, the Zimbabwean Dollar and Venezuelan Bolivares. I think that the only time that fiat will become zero is when the government that backs it up and makes it a legal tender collapses or an apocalypse where resources are more valuable than paper money.

It eventually will. And I believe debt and saving is the main issue why such eventuality come to happen. It's not all sad though, especially now that we have bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which can very well act as the currency of the future. So it's not like we are left with no choice here. But I digress, we should all get our balls ready for this happening, it's slowly coming to reality, and it's just going to be a matter of time until such event happens.

If not zero, then perhaps replaced or abandoned. Such is probably the fate not just of all fiat money but all forms of money. However, it seems fiat money is the weakest form. It is built upon very unstable, untrustworthy, and shaky a foundation. Backed with nothing, fiat money is meant to die sooner or later. It may be a truly amazing creation, but one which is not expected to last, especially because it is susceptible to human manipulation and abuse. And as we all know, with massive power, which is what control over fiat is, humans can't be trusted.

So 1720 the pound had a value of above zero

2021 the pound has a value of above zero.

So topic title is false.

Maybe switzerland 🇨🇭 has also done it.

Not sure about any other place.

Maybe not the swiss. looks like the swiss franc dates to 1798.

Usd dates to maybe 1781 not 1776.

but the pound certainly makes title wrong.

This is the first time I hear something like this about fiat currency and this is the reason why the government shouldn't be totally trust because they usually say/do things that will be profitable to themselves while they keeping lying to us about the history and the in-depth issue of fiat currency. I believe people like Kiyosaki have already known this which is why he also supported Bitcoin last year but why the government didn't totally support Bitcoin so people can benefit from it.
With that been said, after search the above quotation as advised by Hydrogen and I find out that the issue was once addressed on this forum before.

Anyone interested in this topic, I would recommend doing a keyword search for the above quotation. ("Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero."  --Voltaire)

The rich (or not so rich) history of fiat has been well documented and published many times over the last few years.

As deficits grow and later quantities of fiat are printed to appease debts/liabilities, I suspect the number of pieces published on this topic will multiply.

Aren't you forgetting about the British Pound? It lost a lot of value over the year but I don't think it ever went to 0.

Even if we changed it to 99% of fiat money crashes every 300 years, does it mean we have to wait for it to happen? The Lira is dying as we speak but it won't make people lose everything if they get rid of it and invest.

Some are afraid that we will return to zero, and every year we move away from it. Over the Past 300 Years, No Fiat Money Has Escaped Going to 0
Listen https://podclips.com/c/maVy2k?ss=r&ss2=bitcoin&d=2021-03-22