Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of discusses inflation and deflation however, not many 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 do it would be to link it with money. During the past 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 pay back all the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold isn’t what’s 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’re printing money, so quite simply they are “creating wealth” out of thin air 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 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 give you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy that is true. However, that is not the only reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to pay back the debts we’d, in other words 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. If you keep the money (you worked hard to get) in your money 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 can 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, predicated on inflation and debts.

What about deflation? Well this is often the opposite of inflation in fact it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we’ve deflation when overall the costs 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 money because their value will increase overtime. However merchants will undoubtedly be under constant pressure. They’ll need to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll 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 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 as 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. Which means future generations can 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 could be possible to afford slow growth).

OK so how all this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are designed 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’ll 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 possible for businesses to thrive. More info 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 expensive business can still obtain the capital they need by issuing shares of these 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 must say that area of the costs of borrowing capital will be reduced under bitcoins because the fees will be extremely low and there won’t be intermediaries between transactions (banks rip people off, both borrowers and lenders). This would 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.