Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gold famously doesn't decay, but why should I expect prices to remain constant in terms of gold? If I sell you a chicken today for 80 milligrams of gold, why would you be obligated to sell me an equivalent chicken for 80 milligrams of gold in twenty years? Gold isn't a perfect store or value, it's just a perfect store of gold.
Yea - I was just saying it's probably the closest we have ever gotten. The chicken example is interesting b/c what would you actually compare gold to? Say chickens were commonplace today and could be had for 80 milligrams of gold but then some disease wiped them out and only 10,000 could be grown and sold each year. Obviously they'd be worth more than 80 milligrams of gold - but as prices for other things perhaps com…
Let's switch from goods to services and favors. Let's suppose you're in a real bind one day, and need some help -- painting your house, moving cross-country, who knows -- and I step up and help you as a favor, and spend a solid week of my time.
How long do I have to redeem that favor and get a week's worth of time out of you? How does the intervening time affect the answer? If I disappear for twenty years and show up on your doorstep expecting the favor to be repaid in full, is that a reasonable expectation? What if we are close friends for those twenty years, trading favors back and forth?
There aren't necessarily right or wrong answers to those questions, but that's basically the question inflation answers -- it's the price for not participating. You do a job, you get your currency, and then you can roll your currency into participating in the shared risk for maintaining our systems of production, or you can stand back, and see the credit for your past contributions decay over time. Sometimes it decays slowly, when everything is going fine. Sometimes it decays quickly; if things begin going badly and you're not invested in the outcomes improving, your credit for your past contributions declines faster.