Money do not exist as wealth, they exist to be used as a medium for transactions. They are a representation of wealth but they are not wealth. Their only function is the get circulated. You are seeing things pretty narrowly. Let's say you have 10million. You have the option to keep them under the mattress and they will worth 50% more in 1 year. Or you can invest them into something.

What would you choose? Why would you risk investing that money into something when you can guarantee increasing their value by keeping them? Now imagine if everyone is doing that. Everyone is taking out of circulation trillions of dollars because it is more profitable and less risky for the future.

What effect would that have in the economy, quality of life, technological progress, literally on everything? And this is why deflation is orders of magnitude worse than inflation.

Production for production’s sake is pointless.

Almost all production is for production's sake. Humans need nothing to survive. You can become a hermit and consume nothing. Yet here you are, being inauthentic and buying things that you ultimately do not need for survival. Clothes, coffee, phone, haircut. Even your diet is not maximized for calories needed.

People adapt. Thats how someone can live in extreme poverty with less than 2 dollars a day. Think that next time you buy a 5 dollar coffee. You could have fed 2 people for a day.

If you are talking about why we moved away from the gold standard, yes there being a limited supply was a problem. We pegged a dollar to a certain amount of gold and pretty soon we ran out of gold to buy to maintain that peg

You should read more about the history of gold. We created silver coins because we run out of gold because the rich people hoarded all the gold and did not use it because by not using it, its value kept increasing. So we got the silver coins but then the rich kept hoarding them too. So we made fiat(or their era equivalent).

Bitcoin is not a good currency. The fundamental use of a currency, the whole point of its existence is to be used. Bitcoin is heavily throttled by design and cant be used as an every day currency. No crypto can replace VISA without become centralized and VISA like(which defeats the point of crypto).

I have been following crypto for 10+ years. It is a cool tech(decentralized database) but everything related is a "scam". Even if it isnt a deliberate scam, it is still part of pump and dump and an unusable speculative asset. All volume is whitewashing and gambling addicts. Crypto has basically 0 real world use atm, lower than the use it had 5 years ago. Noone cares about adoption anymore, i wonder why.

Yet the market is up. That should tell you everything you need to know about crypto. It's value is not representative of real world use. Not to mention that the whole point of crypto was decentralization and not having a middleman but most people keep their crypto in exchanges. Crypto dudes are literally reinventing the conventional economic system, with fiat and banks. What do you think the whole layer 2 stuff is? It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad.

Exchanges are literally banks and your account there is literally FIAT. Not your keys, not your money. Your money is just a number in an exchange spreadsheet. And could disappear tomorrow, just like it has happened many times so far(every time an exchange goes bust).

Most people still keep their money on an exchange because ultimately it isnt about the crypto technology, it is about gambling and get rich quick schemes.

Rich people hoard money now too, they just put it into assets and securities and generate a return, then live off the interest.

True but at still in theory, the central bank can nuke their monetary wealth. So they are forced to use it. Buying assets is vastly preferable to keeping the money under the mattress. Again, it is all about circulating the currency, thats its main purpose. This is not a bug, this is a feature of the currency. You arent supposed to hoard it.

Money is a transaction tool. Money is not wealth, it is just used to represent wealth as a convenience. Hoarding money should not be your goal, your goal is to use that money to acquire things, either things that you "need" or "investments".

That’s a money printing & budgeting problem, not a gold problem. That’s a spending more than you have or make problem.

Again, you assume money is wealth. But even if you think it is the evil governments who want to have infinite money, ask yourself, why literally no economist supports the return to gold. Economists are the most contentious breed of people. They disagree on everything. Why do they agree on this?