[CyberDildonics]

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.

[maaku]

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.)

[CyberDildonics]

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.

[lmm]

> (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.

[maaku]

Or Freicoin, which I co-authored with another Blockstream founder. But neither has the network buy-in and security of Bitcoin.

[sfackler]

I am pretty confident that the amount of precious metals in circulation has gone up over the last 1000 years.

[Jtsummers]

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.