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 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. In past times it worked quite well as the money that was issued was associated with gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to cover back all the money it issued. However, during the past century this changed and gold is not what is giving value to money but promises. As possible guess it’s very an easy task 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 put simply they are “creating wealth” out of nothing 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 might give you is that by de-valuing their currency they are helping the exports.

In fairness, in our global economy that is true. However, that’s not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to cover back the debts we had, in other words we make new debts to cover the old ones. But that’s not only it, by de-valuing our currencies we have been de-facto de-valuing our debts. Bitcoin Revolution is why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s better to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. So if you keep the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you’re 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% 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 exactly the opposite of inflation in fact it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s understand why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This might be caused by a rise of value of money. Firstly, it would hurt spending as consumers will undoubtedly be incentivised to save lots of money because their value will increase overtime. On the other hand merchants will be under constant pressure. They’ll have to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money as 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 usually 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 since it will only get bigger over time. Because our economies derive from 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 can pay our debts. Deflation on the other hand 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’re designed to be deflationary. We now 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 would be very expensive 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, simply for clarity, I must say that portion 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 the past generations.