Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of talks about inflation and deflation however, 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 do it would be to link it with money. Previously it worked quite well because the money that has been issued was associated with gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to cover back all of the money it issued. However, previously century this changed and gold isn’t what’s 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 aren’t renouncing to do so. For this reason they are printing money, so quite simply they are “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 will probably be worth less, whoever is selling something has to 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 this? 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’s not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to cover back the debts we had, basically 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’s why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s simpler to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of all 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 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 and it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s understand why. Basically, we have deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This might be caused by a rise of value of money. To start with, it would hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save money because their value will 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 because of their services will drop over time. 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 can be a real burden since it will only get bigger over time. Because our economies are based on debt you can imagine what will be the consequences of deflation.

So to conclude, inflation is growth friendly but is founded on debt. Therefore the future generations will pay our debts. Deflation however makes growth harder but it means that future generations won’t have much debt to cover (in such context it would be possible to cover slow growth).

OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?

Well, coincapcentral are made to be an alternative for the money and 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. 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 a debt-based economy to a share-based economy. Actually, because contracting debts in bitcoins would be very costly business can still have 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 be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I have to say that the main costs of borrowing capital will 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 might 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 we inherited from the past generations.