Recently I started investing in bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of talks about inflation and deflation however, 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 would be to link it with money. During the past it worked quite well as the money that has been issued was associated with gold. So every central bank needed enough gold to cover back all the money it issued. However, before 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 are not renouncing to do so. That is why they’re printing money, so basically they are “creating wealth” out of thin air without really having it. This process not only exposes us to risks of economic collapse but it results also with the de-valuation of money. Therefore, because money is 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 so? 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’s not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we are able to afford to cover back the debts we’d, basically we make new debts to pay the old ones. But that is 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 easier to grow because debts are cheap. But which are the consequences of all this? It’s hard to store wealth. So if you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you are actually losing wealth because your money is de-valuing pretty quickly.

Because each central bank comes with an inflation target at around 2% we can 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 the central banks, let’s understand why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This would be caused by a rise of value of money. To start with, it would hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save lots of money because their value increase overtime. On the other hand merchants will be under constant pressure. They’ll need to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money because the price they will charge for his or her services will drop as time passes. 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 probably the most is DEBT!!. In a deflationary environment debt can be a real burden as it will only get bigger as time passes. 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 would be possible to afford slow growth).

OK so how all this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are made to be an alternative for money also to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They are limited in number and we’ll never have more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they’re designed to be deflationary. coincapcentral have all seen what the consequences of deflation are. However, in a bitcoin-based future it could still be easy 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 want by issuing shares of their 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, just for clarity, I must say that part of the costs of borrowing capital will be reduced under bitcoins as 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 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 people inherited from the past generations.