It's not about 'inflation' it's about hyperinflation. Nobody is treating crypto-currencies as currencies, they're treating them as investment vehicles so the current trend is to create a hyper-deflationary 'currency' so you can tell your original investors that they're 'in on the ground floor' and they have a reason to believe it. You get those guys in, they're incentivized to spread the word, they do so and boom we get what we keep seeing, the fear of missing out and greater fools driving speculation bubbles.
fine is relative. There was a tremendous amount of lost productivity due to the rising cost of gold. Also gold is traditionally a commodity, not a currency. If the value of your thing is that it functions as a transfer medium, and everyone is incentivized not to transfer it, it certainly sounds like it's bad at what it does.
You think that people were sitting and doing nothing, because everyone was hording gold, because it would be worth 1% more in year? Really?
The main function of money is not transferring value. It's keeping track what society as a whole ows to whom. Transferring is just a secondary job. And there's absolutely no need to incentivize it. That's why some cultures used stuff like big rocks as money.
Money is a good money, when you don't want to part with it. And its crappy money, if everybody are just looking for a way to get rid of it.
All the speculative bubbles that we're seeing are caused by lack of real-money. People are trying to get rid of their fiat, and park the value anywhere else.
And it's not very productive when young famillies can't afford to live anywhere, because the houses are used as speculative investment and essentially.. money. It was actually much better when otherwise useless pet rock was taking a function of keeping track of debt in the society and inflated and deflated according to real market conditions.
Well you can't eat it and it doesn't keep you warm. At some point you'll have to spend it. I don't think people spend money because they are aware of inflation anyway. They spend it because they want something. If people are encouraged to think twice about what they need or want, is that really such a bad thing?