Recently I started investing in 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 start with inflation.
We always needed a method to trade value and probably the most practical way to take action is to link it with money. During the past it worked quite well because the money that was issued was linked to gold. So every central bank needed enough gold to cover back all the money it issued. However, in past times century this changed and gold is not what’s giving value to money but promises. Since 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 put simply they are “creating wealth” out of thin air 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 must 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 so? Well the answer they would offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.
In fairness, in our global economy that is true. However, that’s not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to cover back the debts we had, put 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 is 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 carefully the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you are 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. Bitcoin Era Site is how our economies are working, predicated on inflation and debts.
What about deflation? Well this is often the opposite of inflation in fact 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 would 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 will need to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll lose money as the price they will charge for his or her services will drop as time passes. But if 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 will become a real burden as 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 in summary, inflation is growth friendly but is founded on debt. Which means future generations will pay our debts. Deflation alternatively makes growth harder nonetheless it means that future generations won’t have much debt to cover (in such context it might be possible to afford 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 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 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 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 you many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I have to 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 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 people inherited from days gone by generations.