Demurrage (currency) subsidy. Both inflation and demurrage reduce the purchasing power of money held over time, but demurrage does so through fixed regular fees, while inflation does it in a variety of ways. Inflation is certainly not always everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Inflation is not always easy to predict & it does not stay fixed through time, but the level of demurrage is fixed by the Government. Gresham's law that "bad money drives out good" suggests that demurrage fees would mean that a currency would suffer more rapid circulation than competing forms of currency. This led some such as German-Argentine economist Silvio
Gresham's law been noted much earlier, in the 14th century, by Nicole Oresme. In the year that Gresham was born, 1519, it was described by Nicolaus Copernicus in a treatise called "Monetae cudendae ratio": "bad (debased) coinage drives good (un-debased) coinage out of circulation." Copernicus was aware of the practice of exchanging bad coins for good ones and melting down the latter or sending them abroad, and he seems to have drawn up some notes on this subject while he was at Olsztyn in 1519. He made them the basis of a report which he presented to the Prussian Diet held in