The meaning and importance of currency that governments cannot arbitrarily print.
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Drop a real gold coin on a hard surface and listen. It rings - a clear, sustained tone that fakes can't reproduce. That's where the word "sound" in sound money comes from: money you can hear is genuine.
Today the idea goes deeper than gold coins. Sound money is money whose supply nobody can manipulate - not a king clipping coins, not a central bank running a printing press, not a politician promising free programs. When the money supply is fixed or predictable, it stays honest. When it isn't, everything downstream breaks.
Money isn't just something you spend. It's the signaling system of the entire economy. Prices tell producers what to make. Interest rates tell entrepreneurs when to invest. Profits tell everyone whether resources are going to the right places.
When money can be created at will, those signals get scrambled. Prices lie. Interest rates send false invitations. Businesses invest in projects that should never have started. The economy booms on fiction, then crashes on reality.
Good money should have the following properties:
Bitcoin surpasses gold in all these properties. Particularly in portability and verifiability, it is overwhelmingly superior.
Since the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971: