What Is Inflation and Deflation and a Speculation Concerning the Bitcoin Future

Recently I started investing in bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of talks about inflation and deflation but not many people actually know and think about what inflation and deflation are. But let’s start with inflation.

plateforme de trading en ligne needed a method to trade value and probably the most practical way to do it would be to link it with money. During the past it worked quite well as the money that has been issued was linked to gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to pay back all the money it issued. However, previously century this changed and gold isn’t what’s giving value to money but promises. As possible 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 in other words they are “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, 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 that is true. However, that is not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to pay back the debts we had, 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 is why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s easier to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. So if you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to get) 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% per year. This discourages savers and spur consumes. This is how our economies are working, based on inflation and debts.

What about deflation? Well this is often the opposite of inflation and it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the costs of goods fall. This might be caused by an increase of value of money. To start with, it would hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save lots of money because their value increase overtime. Alternatively merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They’ll have to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money as the price they will charge for his or her services will drop over time. 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 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 founded on debt. Therefore the future generations will pay our debts. Deflation on the other hand makes growth harder nonetheless it implies that future generations won’t have much debt to pay (in such context it will be possible to cover slow growth).

OK so how all this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are designed to be an alternative for money also 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 possible for businesses to thrive. The ideal solution will be to switch from the 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 their company. This could be a fascinating alternative as it will offer many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will undoubtedly be distributed more evenly among people. However, simply for clarity, I have to say that area of the costs of borrowing capital will 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 might 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 we inherited from days gone by generations.