Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of talks about inflation and deflation but not many people actually know and consider what inflation and deflation are. But let’s start with inflation.
We always needed ways to trade value and probably the most practical way to take action is to link it with money. In past times 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 of the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold is not what’s giving value to money but promises. As you can guess it’s very an easy task to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks aren’t renouncing to do so. That is why they’re printing money, so quite simply they’re “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This technique not merely exposes us to risks of economic collapse but 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 might offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they are helping the exports.
In fairness, inside our global economy this is true. However, that’s not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to pay back the debts we’d, quite simply we make new debts to cover the old ones. But that’s not only it, by de-valuing our currencies we are 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. So if you keep the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you’re actually losing wealth because your cash is de-valuing pretty quickly.
Because each central bank has 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 one way 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 understand why. Basically, we have deflation when overall the costs of goods fall. This would be caused by a rise of value of money. For starters, it could hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save money because their value increase overtime. On the other hand merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They’ll need to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money as the price they will charge for his or her services will drop as time passes. But when 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 a deflationary environment debt can be a real burden since it will only get bigger as time passes. Because coincapcentral derive from debt you can imagine what will function as consequences of deflation.
So in summary, inflation is growth friendly but is based on debt. Which means future generations can pay our debts. Deflation on the other hand makes growth harder but it implies that future generations won’t have much debt to cover (in such context it might be possible to cover slow growth).
OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?
Well, bitcoins are made to be an alternative for the 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 are designed to be deflationary. Now we have all seen what the consequences of deflation are. However, in a bitcoin-based future it could still be possible 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 their company. This could be a fascinating alternative as it will offer you 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 because 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 we inherited from days gone by generations.
