Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot of discusses 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 way to trade value and the most practical way to do it would be to link it with money. Previously it worked quite well as the money that was issued was linked to gold. So coincapcentral had to have enough gold to pay back all the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold isn’t what is giving value to money but promises. Since you can 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 are printing money, so basically they are “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This process not merely 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 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 this? Well the answer they would 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 reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to cover back the debts we had, put simply we make new debts to pay 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 what 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’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 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 exactly the opposite of inflation and it is the biggest nightmare for our central banks, let’s understand why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the costs of goods fall. This would be caused by an increase of value of money. First of all, it would hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save lots of money because their value increase overtime. Alternatively merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They will need to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money as the price they will charge because of their 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 the most is DEBT!!. In a deflationary environment debt can be a real burden since it will only get bigger as time passes. 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. Which means 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 could be possible to afford slow growth).

OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are made to be an alternative for the money and 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 are 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 easy for businesses to thrive. The way to go 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 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 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 as the fees will 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.