I know, Bitcoin is designed to be as free from central bank and politician control as possible. It is open-source, decentralized, etc.
But if you think about it, Bitcoin is still fundamentally worse than gold and silver as a truly free money.
First things first: all of gold, silver and Bitcoin are subject to central bank manipulation by pegging. When central banks store up enough non-state money, they can sell that money for a fixed dollar or pound price, and thus suppress any appreciation of the non-state money in currency terms.
This enables the elites to acquire wealth and power for free, by issuing state currency and debt, as long as the central bank has enough of the non-state money to fight off any 'run on the bank.'This was the real nature of the gold and silver standards through most of modern history, that mainstream economists praised for stabilizing state currencies and economies, at that time. (Of course, they are now firmly against the gold standard, thus both times saying the elites' system was/is good for the economy.)
That said,
Bitcoin suffers from the additional problem that it's secured not by physics, but by algorithm. Algorithms can change. Algorithms are only guarded by humans who are subject to persuasion. At some point, the elites will have issued too many IOUs against the Bitcoin in their vaults. Either we increase the issuance limit from 21 million, or we get a financial crisis and depression. I imagine most of the developers will be open to talking. (BTW, some version of this is almost guaranteed to happen, due to the nature of the world system.
For example, all countries have defaulted on their promises to redeem gold at a fixed price.)
This is in contrast to gold and silver, where violating the limit of issuance is physically impossible (or very expensive, with radioactive reactions.)
Another major weakness of Bitcoin is transparency. In order for the public to hold the elites accountable for their monetary actions, however partially, the easier it is to observe and monitor the system, the better.
The reality is that computer networks and data structures are not easy for most of the public to understand, compared to the age-old concept of holding physical metals.And we know from experience that
the elites take full advantage of lack of public understanding. Besides the 'gold standard good, gold standard bad' flip-flop by establishment economists, almost every major issue of finance is distorted before the public receive the wisdom passed down to it by the media (and this includes, maybe especially includes, channels tailored to the highly educated, like The Economist magazine and America's PBS television.) Southeast Asia in the 90s, Greece recently, and Germany between world wars were made to suffer deflation after their financial crises, and the economic justification was 'moral hazard.' The US was allowed to print devalued money to ease the pain after its own financial crises, and the economic justification was Keynesian pain relief. (The real reason for the differentiation was that American voters had more power to disrupt the elites' system than those other populations.)
With Bitcoin so much easier to manipulate than gold and silver, no wonder,
all the signs are that the elites will promote Bitcoin as the store of value of the future. This makes even more sense when you consider it would be embarassing for the elites to promote gold or silver instead, since their prices would have to rise to a level much higher than the last time the elites tried to fix them. Gold has appreciated 30 time since the elites' fixed postwar price of $35/ounce, and would likely have to appreciate another 30 times before a new (de-facto) gold standard can become stable. This does not make the elites' money look good. Bitcoin has no such history, and the elites can claim (and likely be believed) that they are merely moving money onto a new, electronic foundation that is more stable than a totally fiat system.
As I
mentioned before,
the elites must secretly nurture, if not openly promote, some form of safe store of value that is totally trusted by the public. In today's world, that can only mean non-state-issued money. The only question is which.
