Earlier quoted context omitted.
An EMP taking out the entire world power grid would be a complete disaster for everyone. Goldbugs and people with cash in their mattresses included.
I don't disagree with you that it would be a disaster, I'm just saying that fundamentally crypto is not a store of value. But don't listen to me, I only deliberately burned my early Bitcoin after evaluating it on its merits, weeks after it came out. Nothing, repeat nothing, has ever moved the needle on my opinion of crypto, although I will say that cryptobros will not stop at anything to try and convince people that…
I think it doesn't do this as we have seen the value of gold shift so much over time.
If we look at Roman Empire during Augustus, your average denarius penny in the empire was worth about 10 hours of minimum wage. A denarius was about 1/10 of a troy ounce of silver, and you needed 25 of these to get an 8 gram gold coin, the aureus.
Going by today's standards, your typical 8 gram coin is worth $604.96 USD
If we go by the average minimum wage in the United states, 25 days at $72.5 USD/day for 10 hours of minimum wage, in order to compare to the Roman Empire during Augustus, pre-tax, the same coin was worth $1812.50 USD.
So to briefly summarize:
1 denarius penny = 1/10oz Silver = 10hrs minimum wage, 4 hours minimum wage today nets 10 times the Silver it did 2000 years ago. You can quickly see that if anything, on the basis of Silver alone, that our currency is worth about 23.7 times more than the currency of Rome ever was if we ignore taxes.
3-5% tax rate on total wealth was murder and why riots happened to begin with.
Then we look at the cost of a average small villa in that time period- 200,000 denarii.
You figure this means 200,000 days for your average agricultural worker at 1 denarii/day, but actually it's way more than that because there's the 3-5% wealth tax on them, plus the tax collector wages came from whatever they could extort on top of that.
200,000/365 = 548 years of payments only to a house at 1 denarii/day.
200,000/30 years= 6666.66 denarii/year
6666.66/270 (because I'm nice and assume we get days off in this time period (today)) = 24.69 denarii/day, or about 98.8% of an aureus per day, would be required to own a small villa on a 30 year mortgage during the Emperor Augustus roman empire, (excluding the extreme 3-5% annual total wealth tax).
I figure most people here would agree that even at minimum wage, a personal villa is much more accessible today. Even a $1,000,000 home on minimum wage with zero other expenses or taxes, working 10 hour days, 5 days a week, would basically pay it off on a 51 year mortgage at 1631.25/month.
I think that's why so many people here feel ripped off. Homes would be much more affordable if the loan terms were slightly longer, but there's a bunch of old people out there trying to min/max their investment based income before they die.
I don't see anything wrong with them wanting to do that, but I think it would be wise if consumers began to push for longer mortgages because as a function over time, while the dollar is still worth quite a bit, it is nonetheless losing value. Keeping your mortgage going means the bank gets less value out of the loan over time, assuming inflation remains static.
I know you didn't expect this reply but I enjoyed learning and making it. If you end up going back over it and have any corrections you'd like to make I'm all ears, but I'd agree. Crypto is a crappy place to have a store of value right now and arguably you'd be a fool to not have it invested in the stock market targeted index fund because that's simply how the world of finance works today.
It's not about what we can do in a day, it's about how we can leverage the income to get more done in a day, even if it's not being done by us directly. That's why investing in the stock market, in stocks you trust as a consumer, is so important to the success of capitalism long term.