Recently I started investing in bitcoins and I’ve heard a lot 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 ways to trade value and probably the most practical way to do it would be to link it with money. Previously it worked quite well because the money that was issued was associated with gold. So every central bank had to have enough gold to cover back all of the money it issued. However, during the past century this changed and gold isn’t what’s giving value to money but promises. As you can guess it’s very an easy task to abuse to such power and certainly the major central banks aren’t renouncing to do so. plateforme de trading fiable 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 will probably be worth less, whoever is selling something must increase the price of goods to reflect their real value, that 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 are helping the exports.

In fairness, in 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 had, put simply 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 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 comes with an inflation target at around 2% we can 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 the central banks, let’s understand 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 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’ll need to sell their goods quick otherwise they will lose money because the price they will charge for 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 will become a real burden as it will only get bigger as time passes. Because our economies are based on debt you can imagine exactly 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 alternatively makes growth harder nonetheless it implies that future generations won’t have much debt to pay (in such context it might 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 and 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’re 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 a debt-based economy to a share-based economy. Actually, because contracting debts in bitcoins will be very expensive business can still have 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 must say that the main costs of borrowing capital will undoubtedly be reduced under bitcoins because the fees would be extremely low and there won’t be intermediaries between transactions (banks rip people off, both borrowers and lenders). This might 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 people inherited from the past generations.