Bitcoin's inflation rate is higher than the USD though? Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87%
USD Current inflation rate for the United States is
2.7%.Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation. Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation. Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free. So if you were truly concerned about long term stability - gold or tangible functional assets would be much safer than software based pet rocks. https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/cve-2018-17144-the-aftermath... The obvious worst part of this bug was the inflation
exploit. An attack could create new bitcoins at will,
exceeding the 21 million hard cap limit that is
currently in place. This would absolutely destroy
confidence in not only Bitcoin, but every
cryptocurrency.
In addition, a miner could crash every single node they
are connected to by producing a block with an invalid
transaction in it. Miners are will go out of their way
to connect to as many other mining nodes as possible, so
they receive notifications of blocks faster.
Imagine you’re a miner, hashing away at block #1000.
Another miner, Jim, finds block #1001 and starts
propagating it around the network. However, you’re not
connected to Jim, so it takes an extra few seconds for
you to receive the block. During those few seconds, the
network has moved on and you’re wasting hashpower and in
turn money. You need to receive the new block before you
get started on the next one.
All the miners are highly connected, so if one is
producing client-crashing blocks, many of the larger
miners would be hit.
Quite a concerning catastrophe that has no guarantee of being avoided in the future, as any programer knows how many bugs can hide or be exploited in any code base. |
However, it is more common to measure inflation by the increase in nominal prices of goods, as I did above with gold. And, by this measure, Bitcoin is deflating. It's hard to measure the deflation rate with precision because it's so volatile, but at the beginning of 2011, it was worth 10¢, and now it's US$6600. It's oscillated wildly around the exponential trend line by about a factor of 3 on each side, but the trend line itself is a deflation by about 75% per year (or of 300% per year, if you look at deflation that way.)
Presumably this won't continue forever, as it's more appropriate to tulip bulbs than to a usable currency, but it is certainly quite far from inflation in the usual sense.