[Jason14h]

Inflation is a core feature of our current financial system, you cannot just swap it out for deflation and tinker around a bit to fix the systemic issues that would arise. Just one example is loans - if I loan you a bitcoin at 5% interest, next year you owe me 1.05 bitcoins. If the future bitcoin has appreciated 20% in value that year, you now owe me the equivalent of 1.26 bitcoins, for a real interest rate of 26%. You would need to charge negative interest rates to make loans attractive to borrowers in that case, and why would a bank do that when they could just keep the money for a year and make 20%?

How is that any different then if I lend you 1.00 CAD dollars and then price of CAD $ relative to USD has appreciated 20%. You have lost USD purchasing power.

If the argument is Canadian goods and services purchase price is more stable to the Canadian $$$ then it would be for Bitcoin, Well, Maybe. Unless you need good that come from the states and the cost of those goods has gone up, thus making you real purchasing power go down. This is already how the world economy runs. Different currencies have different values based on their demand and supply of the currency.

Now in North American and Western Europe where prices are stable and the government does a relatively good job of controlling inflation this is a lot lower of a risk, but in many economies holding the local currency results in less purchasing power every day.

You need to convert your purchasing power into a portable means that holds value. Cryptocurrencies make that very easy.

This is but one reason why the idea of subdividing bitcoins smaller and smaller over time, aka deflation, is not workable. Another is that, unlike fiat money supply which is controlled by governments, there is going to be no central authority which will be able to control the rate at which deflation occurs. This is not a strength of bitcoin, but a weakness - how will it deflate? Do you think human beings willingly will take a yearly salary cut? Merchants will charge less and less bitcoin for their goods just because? Where is the incentive, and what market force will cause that to happen?

Supply and Demand currently dictate the value of a currency. As the government prints more money, if global demand for that currency doesn't follow the new supple, the currency will devalue relative to other currencies.

The US government can print as much USD as they want because there is a massive global demand for USD.

What would happen to the price of a USD if the US government stopped printing more AND demand stayed the same GLOBALLY? It would go through the roof in markets that want to exchange their local currency for the stable purchasing power a USD gives.

Not with the blockchain bitcoin uses. Maybe some better-designed crypto might do that, but bitcoin is extremely inefficient at recording transactions. A cursory search shows that the btr transaction fee on October 29th of this year was $11.66. That is hardly disruptive, other than negatively. https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-tra...-fees-hashrate

Agreed. I am more talking about crypto in general. I have repeated many time Bitcoin may not be the winner. It is still early tech and adoption. It needs to get more scalable and cheaper.

I don't really care enough to go through every single thing you assert and check it. Explain how deflation would work, with concrete examples, and I'll be happy to debate that, though.

The entire premise of Bitcoin is it doesn't deflate on 'debt' as the traditional monetary systems do, but as the economy as a whole grows.

Your argument isn't anything new/insightful. It has been the argument since the start of fixed supply crypto (It's also why non fixed Crypto currencies have been created/tried/experimented with)

I don't think anyone here (Or at least not me) is arguing Bitcoin will be the only and only world currency, that all other currencies will fall and that governments will only operate on Bitcoin.

At the end up the day Bitcoin may end up better classified as a completely liquid and portable digital asset then a monetary setting currency. However, in reality, all currencies are essentially tied to the USD already and priced accordingly.

When the majority of the world prefers not to hold their local economies currency or lives in a country where the government has strict currency controls that are not for the benefit of their citizens, something will/needs to change. Crypto is the first step in disrupting this system and were starting to see big corporations, governments, banks, and credit instruments all get involved.