Like precious metals? Deflationary currencies have been used successfully for over 1000 years.
The only people it is bad for are governments. Throughout history there is a patter of promising, spending, and becoming insolvent.
The idea that an individual wouldn't choose a deflationary currency is ludicrous. Inflationary currencies are what you want everyone else to use.
And by the way, the cat is out of the bag. Cryptocurrencies are here, bitcoin or not. When people can choose to use any currency they want, will they choose one that inflates? I doubt it.
Yes, like precious metals. The history of precious metal economies is pretty bad -- decades-long recessions and wars triggered by fluctuations in the commodity markets. Deflationary currency is not a good thing, and bitcoiners will eventually realize this.
(Note I work on Bitcoin Core and co-founded Blockstream, a prominant bitcoin company. The value of Bitcoin is not the currency, but rather what censorship-resistant, distributed global consensus gives us.)
The value of bitcoin is in properties of ideal money.
> decades-long recessions and wars triggered by fluctuations in the commodity markets
As opposed to now where we have no recessions and no wars? A deflationary currency doesn't cause a recession, the unwinding of practices like fractional reserve banking or the deleveraging of debt do. When these spin out of control the financial system becomes fragile because none of the intermediaries are resistant to any sort of failure to be able to keep their promises. If no one person in an organization is really accountable, why would they care? They can make short term gains, and when things fails they all fail together and no one really has to claim any substantial responsibility - they can say 'it just happened'.
So what you are talking about is a problem with certain systems, not with money that doesn't lose value. Then again it doesn't come as a surprise that a co founder of a company so misguided and desperate doesn't really understand systems, accountability, or even bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.
That is like saying 'the value of the discrete cosine transform isn't JPEG but what it lossy compression gives us'. They are separate things, and denying the impact of one is a simple, easy, and wrong answer.
> (Note I work on Bitcoin Core and co-founded Blockstream, a prominant bitcoin company. The value of Bitcoin is not the currency, but rather what censorship-resistant, distributed global consensus gives us.)
You can get that while being less deflationary though, e.g. Dogecoin.
AS sfackler points out, mining of precious metals has continued (though, like bitcoin, with diminishing returns over time).
They will choose an inflationary currency if they have any debt. Debt with deflation is very bad, and it's incredibly stupid to offer credit with deflation.
So let's see... We have an inflationary currency which is behind an increasing divide between the rich and the poor[0], and keeps people hooked on unsustainable growth to just survive, leading to intensifying environmental destruction and wanton consumption of limited resources... It's not like an inflationary currency is necessarily a good idea, either.
[0] before you say that inflation hurts the rich, among other reasons the if inflation didn't hurt the poor, we would never feel the political pressure to increase the minimum wage.
Essentially, if you think that a currency will be worth more tomorrow than it is today there is little reason for investment (or even spending!). It quickly becomes a spiral where no one wants to spend. Inflation provides a nice kick in the pants for people to put their money to good use.
This isn't a concern yet for Bitcoin because in the scheme of world economies BTC simply doesn't matter (it could go away tomorrow without any noticeable effects), but if in the future it becomes a critical thing it would be a major concern.
Deflationary spirals are a hypothetical concern and mostly a fringe neo-Fisherian idea that has recently gained some mainstream nodding, but is otherwise difficult to verify in any way.
For one thing it assumes a massive collective irrationality where people's expectations are all rendered berserk and plunged into a negative time preference. It's a very tough gambit to make that people can withdraw their propensity to consume to such a high extent. It's tough to presume that the heterogeneous stock of capital and the time structure of production will just stand still to a deflationary pressure and not readjust to add more stages or adjust the price spreads in between. [1] Of course, BTC being a global currency means it exists in competition and per Gresham's law can always be driven out. Not a catastrophe.
>For one thing it assumes a massive collective irrationality where people's expectations are all rendered berserk and plunged into a negative time preference.
One of the more idiotic ideas to come out of neoclassical economics is the assumption that a negative time preference is irrational or impossible, when most of us have one (pension, passing wealth on to one's kids, saving up to buy big ticket items, etc.).
Indeed, what would really be irrational is spending all of your money immediately.
Aren't we learning in today's environment where prices of many things are going down (or with recent Japan as an example), that deflation isn't necessarily bad? In the past it is associated with recessions, but it may be a side effect of the recession or depression, or an over-adjustment by governments trying to reign in inflation.
I'm no economist, but it seems like a lot of things (most, by dollar amount) I buy are simply not things I could feasibly defer for long. Food and rent (shelter) are the obvious examples by necessity, but also plenty of discretionary spending is obviously time-sensitive. I want to see a movie now, go skiing now, fly home for the holidays now, etc. It's unlikely that deflation stop me from making these purchases, unless it was some guaranteed short-term high-percentage deflation.
It doesn't take a big change of behavior if there are a lot of people doing it. If everyone reduced spending by just a couple of percent it would radically change the economy and growth forecasts (we'd be in a recession). Lowered growth forecasts would then incentivize savings, further pushing down future growth. There is no Bitcoin Fed that could cut rates and incentivize investment, a Bitcoin dominated world in recession would be a dire place to be.
It is not so much that it stops people from spending - it is that it makes the real interest rate high relative to the nominal and so discourages borrowing.
Actually with negative interest rates proving possible (almost nobody thought they were a few years ago) if you had a deflationary currency you could always use negative interest rates to control demand. I am sure some smart economist has looked into this.
I'm no fan of fiat, but your statement is tautological at best: the fiat currencies that have collapsed, collapsed. Communications tech and electronic fiat make the future anyone's bet.
The problem sounds like the debts, not the gold. Since, if you accept the debt deflation hypothesis and the idea of debt overhangs, these obviously occur in fiat money systems as well. Gold makes it hard to inflate monetarily, but we observe that catastrophic debts still occur in its absence.
Catastrophic debts occur in its absence, but fiat money gives a way to handle catastrophic debt in ways that are a lot less harmful than when it happens in a gold based system.
That's a long way away, by then either bitcoin becomes popular, bitcoin evolves into something else or bitcoin dies.
Right now all comments about "inflation" etc are downright silly, usually form people regurgitating sill cons against bitcoin that are not a concern at this time.
But lets not have fact get in the way, downvote away.
Then blocks continue to be created, but no more coins are mined (in practice, we will be mining tiny little fractions of a coin for a very long time until it drops off to true zero).
If no more coins are mined (or the mining rate drops to almost negligible levels), is there still any incentive for people to keep the blockchain alive by computing power? Aside from keeping the whole system alive, I mean.
When you request a transaction you also offer a fee. You get to set the fee. If miners don't like it they don't have to include your transaction, and if that happens your transaction will not get confirmed.
After no more coins are mined, miners will be relying entirely on transaction fees. At that point, competition will show us the real cost (and electricity used) for transactions.
Right now transaction fees are low(er) because miners can offset their costs against the coins that they mine as well.
That's always true of the future, but the difficulty is continually self adjusting and pluggable and quantum proof algos exist so that'll be about the timeline no matter the power of future CPU's.