Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of talks about inflation and deflation however, not many people actually know and think about what inflation and deflation are. But let’s focus on inflation.
We always needed a method to trade value and the most practical way to take action would be to link it with money. In the past it worked quite well as the money that has been issued was associated with gold. So every central bank needed enough gold to pay back all the money it issued. However, before century this changed and gold isn’t what is giving value to money but promises. Since you can guess it’s very an easy task to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks are not renouncing to do so. Because of this they are printing money, so basically they are “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This technique not only exposes us to risks of economic collapse nonetheless it results also with the de-valuation of money. Therefore, because money is worth less, whoever is selling something has to raise the price of goods to reflect their real value, that is called inflation. But what’s behind the amount of money printing? Why are central banks doing so? Well the answer they would give you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.
In fairness, in our global economy this is true. However, that’s not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to pay back the debts we’d, quite simply we make new debts to pay the old ones. But that’s not only it, by de-valuing our currencies we have been de-facto de-valuing our debts. That is why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s simpler to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of all this? It’s hard to store wealth. If you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to get) in your money you are actually losing wealth because your money is de-valuing pretty quickly.
Because each central bank has an inflation target at around 2% we are able to well say that keeping money costs most of us at least 2% each year. This discourages savers and spur consumes. This is one way our economies are working, based on inflation and debts.
What about deflation? Well this is exactly the opposite of inflation in fact it is the biggest nightmare for our central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the costs of goods fall. This would be caused by an increase of value of money. Firstly, it could hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save money because their value will increase overtime. Alternatively merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They will need to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money because the price they will charge for his or her services will drop over time. But if there is something we learned in these years is that central banks and governments do not care much about consumers or merchants, what they care the most is DEBT!!. In Bitcoin Revolution will become a real burden since it will only get bigger as time passes. Because our economies are based on debt you can imagine exactly what will function as consequences of deflation.
So to summarize, inflation is growth friendly but is founded on debt. Therefore the future generations can pay our debts. Deflation however makes growth harder but it means that future generations won’t have much debt to cover (in such context it might be possible to afford slow growth).
OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?
Well, bitcoins are designed to be an alternative for the money also to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They are limited in number and we will never have a lot more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they’re designed to be deflationary. We now have all seen what the results of deflation are. However, in a bitcoin-based future it could still be possible for businesses to thrive. The ideal solution will be to switch from the debt-based economy to a share-based economy. Actually, because contracting debts in bitcoins will be very costly business can still obtain the capital they want by issuing shares of these company. This could be a fascinating alternative as it will offer you many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will undoubtedly be distributed more evenly among people. However, simply for clarity, I have to say that portion of the costs of borrowing capital will be reduced under bitcoins as the fees would be extremely low and there will not be intermediaries between transactions (banks rip people off, both borrowers and lenders). This would buffer some of the negative sides of deflation. Nevertheless, bitcoins will face many problems unfortunately, as governments still need fiat money to pay back the huge debts that people inherited from the past generations.
