WHAT’S Inflation and Deflation and a Speculation Concerning the Bitcoin Future

Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of talks about inflation and deflation but not lots of 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 probably the most practical way to take action would be to link it with money. Before it worked quite well as the money that was issued was associated with gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to pay back all of the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold isn’t what’s giving value to money but promises. As possible guess it’s very easy to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks aren’t renouncing to do so. Because of this they are printing money, so basically they’re “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This process not only exposes us to risks of economic collapse but it results also with the de-valuation of money. Therefore, because money will probably be worth less, whoever is selling something has to increase 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 this? Well the answer they would offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy that is true. However, that’s not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to pay back the debts we’d, quite simply we make new debts to cover the old ones. But that is not only it, by de-valuing our currencies we have been de-facto de-valuing our debts. That’s why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s easier to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. So if you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you are actually losing wealth because your money is de-valuing pretty quickly.

Because each central bank comes with an inflation target at around 2% we can well say that keeping money costs all of us at least 2% per year. This discourages savers and spur consumes. This is how our economies are working, based on inflation and debts.

What about deflation? Well this is exactly the opposite of inflation and it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the costs of goods fall. This would be caused by a rise of value of money. To start with, it could hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save money because their value will increase overtime. However merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They will have to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll lose money as the price they will charge for their services will drop over time. But when there is something we learned in these years is that central banks and governments usually do not care much about consumers or merchants, what they care probably the most is DEBT!!. In a deflationary environment debt can be a real burden since it will only get bigger over time. Because our economies are based on debt you can imagine what will function as consequences of deflation.

So to summarize, inflation is growth friendly but is founded on debt. Which means coincapcentral will pay our debts. Deflation alternatively makes growth harder but it means that future generations won’t have much debt to pay (in such context it would be possible to cover slow growth).

OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are designed to be an alternative for money also to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They’re limited in number and we’ll 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 would still be easy for businesses to thrive. The way to go will be to switch from a debt-based economy to a share-based economy. Actually, because contracting debts in bitcoins will be very expensive business can still obtain the capital they want by issuing shares of these company. This could be an interesting alternative as it will offer many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will be distributed more evenly among people. However, simply for clarity, I must say that section of the costs of borrowing capital will undoubtedly 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 a few of the negative sides of deflation. Nevertheless, bitcoins will face many problems unfortunately, as governments still need fiat money to cover back the huge debts that people inherited from the past generations.

Post navigation