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

Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of discusses inflation and deflation but not lots of people actually know and consider 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 is to link it with money. In the past 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, previously century this changed and gold isn’t what is giving value to money but promises. As you can guess it’s very easy to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks aren’t renouncing to do so. For this reason they’re printing money, so quite simply they are “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This process not only exposes us to risks of economic collapse nonetheless 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 money printing? Why are central banks doing so? Well the answer they might give you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy this is true. However, that is not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to pay back the debts we’d, in other words we make new debts to pay 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 which are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. So if coincapcentral keep carefully 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 one way our economies are working, based on inflation and debts.

What about deflation? Well this is often 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 a rise of value of money. First of all, it could hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save lots of 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 because of their services will drop as time passes. 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 the most is DEBT!!. In a deflationary environment debt will become a real burden as it will only get bigger over time. Because our economies derive from 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 future generations will pay our debts. Deflation however makes growth harder but it means that future generations won’t have much debt to pay (in such context it will be possible to afford slow growth).

OK so how all this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are made to be an alternative for money and to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They are limited in number and we will never have more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they are designed to be deflationary. We now 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. Actually, because contracting debts in bitcoins would be very costly business can still obtain the capital they need by issuing shares of these company. This could be an interesting alternative as it will offer you many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will undoubtedly be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I must say that area of the costs of borrowing capital will undoubtedly be reduced under bitcoins because the fees will be extremely low and there will not be intermediaries between transactions (banks rip people off, both borrowers and lenders). This would buffer a number 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.