Recently I started investing in bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of discusses inflation and deflation but not many people actually know and consider what inflation and deflation are. But let’s focus on inflation.

We always needed ways to trade value and the most practical way to do it would be to link it with money. In the past it worked quite well as the money that has been issued was linked to gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to cover back all of the money it issued. However, in the past century this changed and gold is not what’s giving value to money but promises. As possible guess it’s very easy to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks are not renouncing to do so. For this reason they’re printing money, so in other words they’re “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 has to increase the price of goods to reflect their real value, this is called inflation. But what’s behind the amount of money printing? Why are central banks doing so? Well the answer they might give you is that by de-valuing their currency they are helping the exports.

In fairness, inside 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, basically 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. That’s why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s easier to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. If you keep the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your bank account you are actually losing wealth because your money 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 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 our 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. For starters, it would hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save money because their value will increase overtime. However More info 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 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 will become a real burden as 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 alternatively makes growth harder nonetheless it implies 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, bitcoins are designed 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 will never have a lot more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they are 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 have the capital they need 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 undoubtedly be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I have to say that portion 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 would buffer some 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 people inherited from the past generations.