Currency is not the same as money. Currency is cash and it is mere paper issued by the governments, based on pure faith in its value. There is NO value in this currency other than the value placed on it by the psychological belief that it is worth what is printed on it.
Money is something that has ACTUAL INTRINSIC VALUE. Money is something that doesn’t need the FIAT or declaration that it has value. Money has value because civilization has held it to be valuable. The money has value independent of what a bank or government says it has. This is different from cash, that is mere paper with a declared value.
Fiat currency is just an arbitrary decree or order by the government that the paper money has a chosen value. It is not MONEY it is currency.
Inflation is the expansion or increase in the money supply by the Central banks. With Inflation, everything goes up in value except the paper currency.
Currency is expanded by the government through deficit spending, quantitative easing, and fractional banking. Currency is in effect diluted in value by over supply into the system.
The very purpose of fiat currency is designed to lose value over time, to help continue deficit spending. Fiat currency, as a system, has as its hidden purpose, the goal of wealth confiscation by transferring wealth from your savings account to the government. It is a secret tax.
When government prints a new dollar and spends it, the government gets the full purchasing power of that dollar, secretly stolen from the dollar you were saving. Each dollar that enters circulation devalues the existing dollar you are holding or saving.
Gold and silver have been predominant currency for over 5000 years. Lydia mined and minted gold and silver coins around 680 BC.
Governments didn’t take long to begin to interfere with the gold and silver system of money. Athens, a free market economy, used gold and silver coins as its money and function well, until its debts mushroomed because of its appetite for starting wars. After being stuck in a 22-year war, Athenian began to water down or debase its money. They began mixing copper into the gold and silver coins to spend double what they had been spending. This act of debasing was to become the favorite act of governments from that point on.
Once Athens did this this to the currency, it became worthless, and people could not buy anything with it. The citizens of Athens saw what was happening and began hording the original gold and silver, outside of the currency system.
ROME was to later follow along by debasing its coins every time it ran into long protracted wars, creating episodes of mass inflation throughout the Roman empire. By the reign of emperor Diocletian, in 301 AD, Roman coins were tin plated copper or bronze. Diocletian issued his Edict of Prices, which imposed the death penalty on anyone selling goods for more than the government decreed as acceptable. This first attempt at market manipulation had no effect on prices that just continued to skyrocket. Merchants closed their stores because they could not sell their goods at the decreed price, so they chose to close instead of execution. People were forced into the first welfare state by an arrogant emperor who thought he could decree an economy to bend to his will. During this time, 20 percent of the population became dependent on government handouts to survive. This was to become an unfortunate repeating habit of leaders and kings throughout history.
Diocletian created the first known example of hyperinflation where a pound of gold was worth 50,000 denarius in 301 AD. The price of gold had risen 42,400 times in fifty years.