WHAT’S Inflation and Deflation and a Speculation Concerning the Bitcoin Future
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 start with inflation.
Bitcoin Revolution Official 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 was issued was linked to gold. So every central bank needed enough gold to cover back all of the money it issued. However, during the past century this changed and gold is not what’s giving value to money but promises. As possible 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 in other words they are “creating wealth” out of thin air 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 will probably be worth less, whoever is selling something must 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 this? 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 is not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to cover back the debts we’d, put simply we make new debts to cover the old ones. But that is 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 easier 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 bank account you’re actually losing wealth because your cash is de-valuing pretty quickly.
Because each central bank comes with an inflation target at around 2% we are able to well say that keeping money costs all 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 and it is the biggest nightmare for our central banks, let’s understand why. Basically, we have deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This might be caused by an increase of value of money. Firstly, it would hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save money because their value will increase overtime. However merchants will be under constant pressure. They’ll need 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 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 as time passes. Because our economies are based on debt you can imagine exactly what will be the consequences of deflation.
So to summarize, inflation is growth friendly but is based on debt. Which means future generations will pay our debts. Deflation on the other hand makes growth harder nonetheless it means that future generations won’t have much debt to pay (in such context it could be possible to cover slow growth).
OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?
Well, bitcoins are designed to be an alternative for the money and to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They’re limited in number and we will never have a lot more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they’re designed to be deflationary. Now we have all seen what the consequences 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. In fact, because contracting debts in bitcoins would be very expensive business can still have 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, just for clarity, I have to say that the main 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 might 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 we inherited from the past generations.
