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

We always needed a method to trade value and the most practical way to take action would be to link it with money. In past times it worked quite well as the money that was issued was associated with gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to cover back all the money it issued. However, in technical analysis changed and gold isn’t what is giving value to money but promises. As you can guess it’s very easy to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks are not renouncing to do so. Because of this they’re printing money, so in other words they’re “creating wealth” out of nothing without really having it. This technique 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 must raise 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 this? Well the answer they might offer you is that by de-valuing their currency they are helping the exports.

In fairness, inside our global economy this 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 had, 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 is why our countries love inflation. In inflationary environments it’s better to grow because debts are cheap. But what are the consequences of most this? It’s hard to store wealth. If you keep carefully the money (you worked hard to obtain) in your money you’re 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% 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’ve deflation when overall the prices of goods fall. This might be caused by a rise of value of money. First of all, it could hurt spending as consumers will be incentivised to save money because their value will increase overtime. On the other hand merchants will be under constant pressure. They’ll have to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money because 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 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 what will be the consequences of deflation.

So to conclude, inflation is growth friendly but is based on debt. Therefore the future generations will 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 might be possible to cover slow growth).

OK so how all this fits with bitcoins?

Well, bitcoins are designed 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 will never have more than 21 million bitcoins around. Therefore they are designed to be deflationary. We now 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 obtain the capital they want by issuing shares of these company. This could be a fascinating alternative as it will offer many investment opportunities and the wealth generated will be distributed more evenly among people. However, simply for clarity, I have to say that section of the costs of borrowing capital will undoubtedly 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 pay back the huge debts that people inherited from days gone by generations.