Recently I started buying bitcoins and I’ve heard a great deal of talks about inflation and deflation but 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 the most practical way to take action would be to link it with money. Before it worked quite well because 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, 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 aren’t renouncing to do so. That is why they are printing money, so put simply 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 offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they’re helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy that is true. However, that’s not the only real reason. By issuing fresh money we can afford to cover back the debts we had, quite simply 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 is why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s better 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 obtain) in your bank account you’re 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 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 often the opposite of inflation in fact it is the biggest nightmare for the central banks, let’s see why. Basically, we have deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This would be caused by a rise of value of money. To begin with, it could 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 will need to sell their goods quick otherwise they’ll 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 can be a real burden since it will only get bigger as time passes. Because Bitcoin Revolution Site 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 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 cover slow growth).

OK so how all of this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are made to be an alternative for the money also to be both a store of value and a mean for trading goods. They’re limited in number and we’ll never have 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. In fact, because contracting debts in bitcoins will be very costly business can still have 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 be distributed more evenly among people. However, just for clarity, I must say that part of the costs of borrowing capital will undoubtedly 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 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 people inherited from the past generations.