XRP's Fixed Supply vs Germany's 1923 Hyperinflation: What It Means
How Germany's 1923 hyperinflation wiped out savers, who came through it, and what XRP's 100 billion supply cap does and doesn't protect holders from.
Key takeaways
- Germany's 1923 hyperinflation came from unchecked money printing, and savers, war bond holders and pensioners lost almost everything.
- People who held land, factories, gold or foreign currency, or who owed debts fixed in marks, mostly came through it.
- XRP's rules cap supply at 100 billion and don't allow new coins to be created, which is a real difference from the 1923 mark, though the rules depend on the code working as written.
- A fixed supply does not mean a steady price: the video notes XRP fell from above $3 in January 2018 to around 11 cents by March 2020 with no new coins created.
- The lesson the video draws is to keep saving, spread wealth across different kinds of things and review your plan regularly, not to hunt for one perfect asset.
Germany’s 1923 hyperinflation wiped out ordinary savers because the government printed money without limit. XRP’s rules cap its supply at 100 billion, so there is no printing press of the kind Germany used. But the video argues a fixed supply doesn’t make XRP safe: its price can still fall, Ripple controls escrow releases, and the rules depend on the code.
For XRP holders, the story is a useful stress test. Many people hold crypto because they worry about money losing value. The 1923 case shows what that loss looks like at its most extreme, who survived it, and which protections actually worked. It also shows that swapping one type of risk for another is not the same as removing risk.
What happened to German money in 1923?
The German mark lost almost all of its value between 1914 and November 1923. According to the video, a careful saver with 100,000 marks in the bank in 1913 held a small fortune, about $24,000 at the exchange rate of the time. Ten years later, that same sum wouldn’t buy a single loaf of bread.
Before the First World War, the mark was seen as one of the world’s solid currencies, at about 4.2 marks to the dollar. Then the war had to be paid for. Germany sold war bonds to its own citizens, but those sales couldn’t cover the deficits, so the printing presses kept running. Ordinary families bought the bonds as a patriotic duty, believing them safe.
After the war, Germany owed large reparations to the winning countries. By the end of 1922, a dollar cost thousands of marks. Between January 11 and 16, 1923, French and Belgian troops, about 60,000 at first and later 100,000, occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The German government told Ruhr workers not to cooperate with the occupation. It kept paying them while they refused to work, and it paid them by printing money.
How fast did prices rise?
Prices in Germany went from expensive to absurd within a single year. The video tracks the price of a loaf of bread in Berlin, using figures most histories cite:
| Month (1923) | Price of a loaf of bread |
|---|---|
| January | about 250 marks |
| July | about 3,500 marks |
| September | about 1.5 million marks |
| November | about 200 billion marks |
The dollar tells the same story. It cost about 4.2 marks in 1914 and about 4.2 trillion marks by November 1923.
Economists Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus compiled a table of every hyperinflation they could find, published through the Cato Institute in 2012. For Germany, the worst month was October 1923, when prices rose about 29,500%. That works out to roughly 21% a day, with prices doubling about every 3.7 days. Accounts from the time describe workers paid more than once a day and rushing to the shops before prices rose again. They carried wages in baskets and wheelbarrows, and some used banknotes as wallpaper.
Why didn’t Germany stop printing?
The people running Germany’s money believed printing was the cure, not the cause. The video plays a clip of Adam Ferguson, author of When Money Dies. He explains that almost no one in the central bank or the government thought there was another way through. They blamed rising prices on speculation and saw printing as necessary to keep up. In Ferguson’s words, they got it the wrong way around.
Rudolf Havenstein, head of Germany’s central bank, the Reichsbank, kept the presses running through most of 1923.
Who came through Germany’s hyperinflation, and who lost?
People who didn’t hold their wealth in marks mostly came through. Savers and people on fixed incomes were ruined. The video splits it this way:
| Group | Outcome in 1923 |
|---|---|
| Owners of land, buildings, farms, factories, gold | Assets still existed after the currency collapsed |
| Holders of US dollars or Swiss francs | Strong position; a few dollars bought what once cost a fortune |
| Borrowers with debts fixed in marks | Often came out ahead, repaying with near-worthless money |
| Savers with money in the bank | Lost almost everything |
| War bond holders | Lost almost everything |
| Pensioners on fixed incomes | Hit hardest of all |
The video cites a 2023 study published through the National Bureau of Economic Research. It found that German companies entering the inflation with more debt tended to do better than those with less.
The best-known winner was the industrialist Hugo Stinnes. He borrowed heavily to buy mines, factories, shipping and newspapers, then repaid his loans in devalued marks. By 1923 he had built one of Germany’s largest business empires. Stinnes died in April 1924, and the video says that once money was stable again, his empire fell apart within a couple of years. As the video puts it, borrowing your way to riches works when money is collapsing and stops working the moment it isn’t.
Back to the 1913 saver. Retiring on 4% interest from 100,000 marks gave a comfortable 4,000 marks a year. By September 1923, a full year of that income wouldn’t buy one loaf of bread. The video stresses that the deeper loss was trust. A generation learned that being careful didn’t protect them, and many historians link that bitterness to the turn German politics took in the following decade.
How did the hyperinflation end?
Germany ended the hyperinflation by introducing a new, strictly limited currency. On November 15, 1923, it brought in the Rentenmark, backed at least on paper by a claim on German land and industry, with a firm cap on how many could be issued. One Rentenmark equalled 1 trillion old marks.
In what the video calls one of history’s odd coincidences, Havenstein died on November 20, 1923. According to standard accounts, that was the day the rate was fixed at 4.2 trillion old marks to the dollar. Prices stopped racing almost overnight. For savers, it was too late. Their savings never came back.
Does XRP’s fixed supply protect you from this?
XRP’s fixed supply addresses one specific risk, unlimited printing, but it does not protect against losses in general. The video plays a clip of Milton Friedman, which it dates to the 1970s, arguing that only whoever controls the printing press can produce inflation. On that point, XRP is different from the 1923 mark.
According to the video:
- The XRP Ledger started in 2012 with 100 billion XRP, and its rules don’t allow more to be created.
- Every transaction destroys a tiny amount of XRP, which Bullrunners covers in how the XRP fee burn works.
- No one can sit in an office and print an extra trillion.
The video then lays out the limits of that protection:
- Ripple controls the release of supply. Most XRP went to Ripple, which put 55 billion XRP into escrow in December 2017. Up to 1 billion can unlock on the first of each month, and what Ripple doesn’t use is usually relocked. The total is fixed, but the amount in the market can grow, and Ripple decides how much. See how Ripple’s monthly escrow release works for the details.
- The rules are only as good as the code. The video points to an old XRP Ledger bug that, according to Crypto Briefing, could have minted XRP beyond the 100 billion cap. The flaw was patched on September 25 and disclosed in early October, and reporting found no evidence it was ever exploited. Bullrunners explained what the XRP Ledger bug could have done.
- A fixed supply doesn’t mean a steady price. The video notes XRP traded above $3 in January 2018 and had fallen to around 11 cents by March 2020, with no extra coins printed. Anyone who bought near the top lost most of their money on paper.
The German saver lost because the supply of marks multiplied. A crypto holder can lose for entirely different reasons. The video is also clear that no one is claiming the pound or the dollar is about to follow the mark. 1923 combined a lost war, heavy debts and a foreign army in the Ruhr all at once. The video does point to UK inflation reaching 11.1% a year in October 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics, as a small taste of the same feeling: decisions made far away quietly shrinking what savings can buy.
The 1923 lesson: a plan the video says still applies
The people who came through 1923 hadn’t picked one perfect asset. According to the video, they simply weren’t relying on a single kind of money run by a single set of decision makers. They owned some real things, held some money from elsewhere, and didn’t have everything in one place. The video frames its advice as what it would tell the 1913 saver, and says it applies to a bag of XRP too:
- Keep saving. Saving was never the mistake.
- Remember that a promise is only as strong as the people keeping it. The value of savers’ marks depended on decisions made in Berlin.
- Spread what you’ve worked for across a few different kinds of things, so no single decision in one place can wipe you out.
- Check every so often whether your plan still makes sense. No one in 1913 could see 1923 coming, which is why, in the video’s words, a plan matters more than a prediction.
What to watch next
The follow-ups worth tracking are the ones the video raises. Ripple’s monthly escrow releases, and how much is relocked, show how much XRP reaches the market. Further disclosures about XRP Ledger bugs and fixes matter because the supply cap depends on the code working as written. The video closes with a question for viewers: if you had been that saver in 1922 and known what was coming, what would you have done differently? It is a prompt to think about how much depends on a single kind of money or a single set of decision makers.
Frequently asked questions
What caused Germany's hyperinflation in 1923?
According to the video, Germany kept printing money to fund the First World War because war bond sales couldn't cover the deficits, and it then owed heavy reparations. When French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, the government paid striking workers with newly printed marks, and prices spiralled.
How bad did German hyperinflation get?
The video says a loaf of bread in Berlin rose from about 250 marks in January 1923 to about 200 billion marks by November. Figures from Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus, published by the Cato Institute, put October 1923 inflation at about 29,500% for the month, with prices doubling roughly every 3.7 days.
Can more XRP be created?
XRP's rules don't allow it. The video explains that the XRP Ledger started in 2012 with 100 billion XRP and that every transaction destroys a tiny amount. It also notes an old ledger bug that, according to Crypto Briefing, could have minted XRP beyond the cap; the bug was patched in late September and disclosed in early October, and reporting found no evidence it was exploited.
Does a fixed supply make XRP a safe store of value?
The video says no. It notes XRP traded above $3 in January 2018 and around 11 cents by March 2020 with no extra coins printed. A fixed supply addresses printing but not price falls.
How did Germany end the 1923 hyperinflation?
On November 15, 1923, Germany introduced the Rentenmark. It was backed on paper by a claim on land and industry and strictly limited in issuance. One Rentenmark equalled 1 trillion old marks, and prices stabilised almost overnight, but savers' lost wealth never returned.
Full video transcript
From the video's captions, lightly formatted. Captions can mishear names and numbers, so check figures against the article above.
If you'd have been a careful saver in Germany in 1913, you'd have put 100,000 marks in the bank, and you'd have a small fortune. And at the exchange rate of today, that was roughly $24,000. 10 years later in November 1923, that same 100,000 marks wouldn't have bought you a single loaf of bread. Actually, not even close. So, yes, Germany printed its savers into ruin in 1923.
And if you want to look at what it teaches us but fixed supply, because again, that's the question every XRP holder ends up asking. And if you own XRP, here's who got rich and who got wiped out when Germany's money died in 1923. Now, the people who had land, factories, and foreign money mostly came through it. At the worst point, prices doubled every few days in 1923, and people who saved sensibly lost almost everything because they'd keep it all in marks. All right, I'm going to walk you through it month by month in this video with the real figures.
And at the end, I'll be fair about what it does and doesn't teach us about XRP because a coin with a fixed supply isn't automatically a safe one. One more thing, guys, before we start, the first link in the description matters here, and I'm going to tell you exactly why before we hit 5 minutes. All right, it was put there for anybody who's ever wondered whether the money they worked for is actually being looked after or if it's just sitting there quietly shrinking. And let's be honest, right? Most of us have felt a little bit of this.
And in October 2022, prices in the UK were rising at 11.1% a year according to the Office of National Statistics. Most of us watched the shopping bill climb up over our savings and buy a little bit less every single month, and nobody really asked us first. Well, that's a tiny version of what happened in Germany, but the feeling is the same one. Decisions made far, far away from us quietly shrink what our savings can buy. All right, before the First World War, the German mark was actually seen as one of the solid currencies of the world.
And in 1914, a dollar cost about 4.2 marks. Then the war came, and it had to be paid for, right? So, here's how the History Channel The Great War explains the choice Germany made.
Instead, they tried to raise funds with war bonds, which allowed German citizens to lend money to the state. But financial deficits caused by the war could not be made up by the sale of war bonds, and the money presses kept on running.
So, think about who bought those war bonds. It was ordinary families, right? Doing their patriotic duty and putting their savings into something they were told was safe. Remember that, because those bonds came back into the story later. After the war, Germany actually owed huge reparations to the countries that won, and the mark kept sliding, and by the end of 1922, a dollar cost thousands of marks.
Then in January 1923, it got far, far worse. Check this out.
Between the 11th and the 16th of January 1923, a force of 60,000 French troops occupied the Ruhr. Later increased to 100,000 men. The French took over civil authority from the Germans.
The Ruhr was the Germany's industrial heartland, right? Where much of its coal and steel came from, and the government told the workers there not to cooperate with the occupation. Now, it kept paying them while they refused to work, and the way it paid them was simple. It printed the money. Now, as guys, before I carry on, as always, this is not financial advice.
Please do your own research. Please hit the subscribe button cuz we're about to cross 400,000 subscribers. Let's roll that intro and get really deep into what's going on here.
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Let's pause the story for a moment, all right? Because there's a lesson in it before we even get into the worst part. Now, the German savers in 1923 couldn't control the printing presses. Well, neither can we. And what they could have controlled and what most of them never thought about was how much of their wealth sat in one kind of a promise.
Well, I'm not telling you to buy XRP here. No, there might be better opportunities for you, right? But it's worth having a plan for whatever you own, and knowing exactly how much of it that you could afford to see go wrong. Well, that's exactly leading me onto this link, okay? Altcoin Pro Calls comes in at this point.
It helps you work out how big a slice of your money any single coin should be, where your coins actually are held, and and what you'd actually do if the worst happened. The next step is a super small, right? Go to the first link in description, fill in the short form, book your free 15-minute call, and one of the team is going to walk you through your own strategy and your own situation. You don't pay anything for this, by the way. It's a completely free.
So, if you're watching this on your phone, hit the more button under the video and it's the first link you're going to see. Guys, do that now before life gets in the way and the tab gets closed and come straight back here because the next part of the story is is the deep bit where the number start making sense, all right? So, let's follow the price of one thing, a loaf of bread in Berlin. These are the figures most histories use. In January 1923, a loaf of bread cost about 250 marks.
By July, it was about 3 and 1/2 thousand. By September, it was about 1 and 1/2 million. And in November 1943, the same loaves cost about 200 billion marks. Now, that dollar tells the same story. Remember in 1914, it cost about 4.2 marks.
By November 1923, it cost about 4.2 trillion. That's a trillion times more. So, the economist Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus put together a table of every hyperinflation they could find and publish it through the Cato Institute in 2012. Now, for Germany, the worst month was October 1923, okay? Prices rose about 29,500% in that 1 month, which is mental, all right?
Worked out per day that that's about 21% and prices were doubling roughly every 3.7 days. So, just think about what that does to a normal day. Accounts from the time describe workers being paid more than once a day and running straight to the shops before the price went up again. People carried their wages in baskets and wheelbarrows. Banknotes became so worthless that people literally used them as wallpaper.
So, why didn't anyone just stop printing? Well, this is the part that surprises people. Here's Adam Ferguson who wrote a well-known book on it called When Money Dies.
The trouble was that the There was no one in the bank and almost no one in the government um who didn't think inflation was the only way through because they all blamed it on not on the printing of money. They said the printing money was necessary because of the speculation because of the inflation. They got it utterly the wrong way around.
The people in charge of the money thought the printing was cure, right? And when it was the cause, they didn't realize. And the man at the top of the Central Bank, the Reichbank, was Rudolf Havenstein, all right? He kept the press running throughout 1923. So, who did well?
Well, most of the people who didn't hold their wealth in marks. If you owned real things like land, buildings, farms, factories, gold, those kind of things, then they were then they were still there when money collapsed. A field is a field, whatever the currency does. And if you hold foreign money like American dollars or Swiss francs, you're in a very strong position. A few dollars could buy what had once cost a fortune in marks.
And if you owed money, you often came out ahead, too. Think about a family with a mortgage on their house. The debt was fixed in marks, and the marks became worthless, so they could pay it all with money that was almost nothing. In 2023, economists like Marcus of Princeton published a study through the National Bureau of Economic Research. It found that German companies that went into the inflation carrying more debt tended to do better than the ones that didn't.
Now, the most famous winner was an industrial called Hugo Stinnes. He actually borrowed heavily and used the money to buy mines, factories, shipping, and newspapers, paying back his loans in marks that had lost their value. By 1923, he'd built one of the biggest business empires in Germany. But, here's the twist. Stinnes died in April 1924, and once the money was stable again, his empire completely fell apart within a couple of years.
Borrowing your way to riches works brilliantly when the money is collapsing. It actually stops working the moment it doesn't. So, there's the other side to this, right? And it's the side most of us would have been on. Savers with money in the bank lost almost everything.
People who bought war bonds lost almost everything. And pensioners on a fixed income were hit hardest of all, right? Because their pension was a set number of marks, and that number bought less every single day. So, let's go back to our savers with this 100,000 marks, right? Say he'd retired on the interest at 4% a year.
So, 4,000 marks in 1913, that was was a decent income to live on. By September 1923, a whole year of it wouldn't have even bought him a single loaf of bread. They were the people who done what they were told. They'd worked, they'd saved, and lent their money to their country. The Great War Channel sums up what was really lost.
Let's see what they've got to say.
For regular Germans, a stable currency represented trust, stability, and measurement of value in everyday life. The value of money guaranteed the value of work, the hours spent in a factory each day, or the price of bread, not only today, but tomorrow and the day after that.
That's the real damage, right? It wasn't just the money, it was the trust. The whole generation of careful people learned that being careful didn't protect them. And many historians linked that bitterness to turn German politics took over the following decade. And here's the strange part, after all that chaos, it ended very quickly.
On the 15th of November 1923, Germany brought in a new currency called the Rentenmark, and it was backed, at least on paper, by a claim on German land and industry. And crucially, there was a strict limit on how many could be issued. One Rentenmark was set up equal to 1 trillion of the old mark. So, John Maynard Keynes, right, brought in as the government's currency commissioner in November 1923, later wrote about how it was done. And in one of history's odd coincidences, Rudolf, the man who kept the presses running, died on the 20th of November 1923.
So, according to the standard accounts, that was the very day the rate was fixed at 4.2 trillion old marks to the dollar. The prices stopped racing pretty much overnight. But for the savers, it was too late. A trillion old marks became a new one, and their savings didn't come back. does any of this teach us? You're probably wondering.
Well, those of us that hold XRP, let me be fair about it, because it's easy to take the wrong lesson. The root of 1923 was super simple. There was no limit on how much money could be made, and the people with the printing presses were under huge pressure to produce it. Now, the economist Milton Friedman put it as about as plain as anyone. Check out this lecture right now from the 1970s.
But none of them produce inflation for the very simple reason that neither the businessman nor the trade union nor the housewife has a printing press in their basement on which they can turn out those green pieces of paper we call money. Only Washington has that printing press and therefore only Washington can produce inflation.
That's the part where XRP is genuinely different, all right? The XRP ledger started in 2012 with 100 billion XRP, and its rules don't allow any more to be created. Every transaction actually destroys a tiny amount. So, nobody can sit in an office and print an extra trillion. But a fair video has to state the rest.
Most of that supply went to the company, and Ripple put 55 billion XRP into escrow in December 2017, which is a sort of time lock. So, up to 1 billion can unlock on the 1st of each month, and what Ripple doesn't use usually gets locked up again. So, the total is fixed, but the amount in the market can grow, and Ripple decides how much. And the rules are only as good as the code. So, on October 26, an old bug in the ledger was disclosed and patched.
Now, according to Crypto Briefing, it could have minted XRP beyond its supply cap. And that's the biggest point is this price, right? A fixed supply doesn't mean a steady price. In January 2018, XRP traded above $3. All right?
By March 2020, it fallen around 11 cents, and nobody printed a single extra coin. And anyone who bought near the top pretty much lost most of their money on paper. Now, the German server lost because of the supply of marks multiplied. A crypto holder can lose for completely different reasons. And to be clear, nobody's saying the pound or the dollar is about to go the way of the mark.
1923 was an extreme case with a lost war, huge debts, and a foreign army in Ruhr all at once, right? So, the honest lesson isn't that XRP is safe. It's Look at who actually came through 1923. It wasn't the people who'd picked the one perfect asset. It was actually people who weren't relying on a single kind of money run by a single set of decision makers.
Now, they owned some real things. They had some real money from elsewhere, and they weren't caught with everything in one place. Now, if we could go back and sit down with the careful saver in 1913 with his 100,000 marks, what would we tell them? Well, we wouldn't tell them to stop saving. Saving was never the mistake.
We'd tell them that a promise is only as strong as the people keeping it. And we'd tell him to spread what he'd worked for across a few different kinds of things. So, no single decision in Berlin could wipe him out. And we'd also tell him to check every so often whether his plan made sense. Nobody in 1913 could have seen 1923 coming, and that's exactly why a plan matters more than a prediction.
That's advice that works in 1923, and it works for a bag of XRP, too. Here's my question for you. If you'd been that saver in 1922, and you'd known what was coming, and what would you have moved your money into? Tell me in the comments if you like history that actually tells us something about our own money, hit subscribe. There's plenty more of it coming.
Crypto's kind of risky, and past results are no guarantee of future ones. Guys, as always, stay bullish.
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Education and commentary only, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile and you can lose money. Do your own research and speak to a qualified advisor before making investment decisions. Figures and quotes are as reported in the video on October 25, 2026 and may have changed since.
