Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of discusses inflation and deflation but not many people actually know and consider what inflation and deflation are. But let’s focus on inflation.
We always needed ways to trade value and the most practical way to take action would be to link it with money. During 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 of the money it issued. However, before century this changed and gold is not 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 Click here are printing money, so put simply they’re “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This process 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 has to raise the price of goods to reflect their real value, this is called inflation. But what’s behind the amount of money printing? Why are central banks doing this? Well the answer they might offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.
In fairness, inside our global economy this is true. However, that’s not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to pay back the debts we’d, basically 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 better to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of all this? It’s hard to store wealth. If you keep the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your bank account you’re actually losing wealth because your money 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 how our economies are working, predicated 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’ve deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This would be caused by a rise of value of money. First of all, it would hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save money because their value increase overtime. Alternatively merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They’ll have to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll lose money because the price they will charge for their services will drop over time. But if 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 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 conclude, 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 means 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 are 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 consequences 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 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 a fascinating alternative as it will offer many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will be distributed more evenly among people. However, simply 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 won’t 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 pay back the huge debts that people inherited from days gone by generations.
