Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of discusses inflation and deflation however, not many people actually know and consider 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 would be to link it with money. During the past it worked quite well because the money that was issued was associated with gold. So Bitcoin Era Review needed enough gold to pay back all the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold is not what is giving value to money but promises. As possible guess it’s very easy to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks are not renouncing to do so. That is why they are printing money, so quite simply they’re “creating wealth” out of thin air without really having it. This technique not only exposes us to risks of economic collapse nonetheless it results also with the de-valuation of money. Therefore, because money is worth less, whoever is selling something must raise the price of goods to reflect their real value, this is called inflation. But what’s behind the money printing? Why are central banks doing so? Well the answer they would offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they are helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy this is true. However, that is not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to pay back the debts we had, put simply we make new debts to cover 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 you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to get) in your bank account you are actually losing wealth because your cash is de-valuing pretty quickly.

Because each central bank has an inflation target at around 2% we are able to well say that keeping money costs most of us at least 2% each year. This discourages savers and spur consumes. This is one way our economies are working, predicated on inflation and debts.

What about deflation? Well this is often the opposite of inflation and it is the biggest nightmare for our central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This might be caused by an increase of value of money. For starters, it could hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save lots of money because their value will increase overtime. However merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They’ll have to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll lose money as the price they will charge for his or her 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 the most is DEBT!!. In a deflationary environment debt will become a real burden as it will only get bigger as time passes. Because our economies derive from debt you can imagine what will be the consequences of deflation.

So in summary, 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 cover (in such context it would be possible to afford 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’ll never have more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they’re designed to be deflationary. Now we have all seen what the results of deflation are. However, in a bitcoin-based future it could still be possible for businesses to thrive. The way to go will be to switch from the debt-based economy to a share-based economy. In fact, because contracting debts in bitcoins will 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 undoubtedly be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I have to say that section of the costs of borrowing capital will be reduced under bitcoins as 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 cover back the huge debts that we inherited from the past generations.