Years ago I bought into the idea that deflationary currency was unworkable because it would make raising capital too hard—that inflationary money was a necessary evil because to do otherwise would be to set a floor on interest rates equal to the real purchasing power accrued simply by holding the currency. I would guess that this remains the number one misconception among informed, intellectually honest critics of bitcoin.
Discussion
my number one "misconception" about bitcoin is that it was literally designed to NOT go up in value.
that was the entire point of mining. to keep it from going up in value.
but it was designed POORLY and works in ways never intended by its creators.
of course according to POSIWID it doesn't really matter what the purpose was supposed to be, we know what it actually ended up being, which is more important.
and what it ended up being is the largest ponzi scheme and waste of energy known to man.
oh and by the way, if you're a HODLer you can shove your opinion up your ass. as the saying goes - never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
I think bitcoin is (will be) the first truly deflationary currency so it’s hard to predict how it would affect the technological progress if it was the only money, whether it will accelerate it or slow it down. But at the same time, Edison and Tesla, Popov and Marconi, Wright brothers and many others didn’t have access to massive loans of unsupported paper dollars, and still they made breakthroughs. I think fundraising for new experiments and development will have to be revisited completely. It will have to be efficient, reasonable, with proof of concept, and clear documentation (well, how it is actually supposed to be…).
It will be like that time, but on steroids: https://mises.org/mises-daily/truth-about-robber-barons
Hmm, to me, the number one would be the threat of government persecutions defending their fiat monopoly.
Necessity of inflation was always rather something that economists learn to repeat, but don't really think through the deflation fears there.
it does make you wonder why government won't do more to fight bitcoin ...
like if i was government and existed by printing money i would murder every single last one of you by burning you and your entire family alive ...
yet they do LITERALLY NOTHING
bitcoiners have yet to explain this ...
The deflation being bad argument may have started as a post facto way to justify policy but many educated people now believe this earnestly.
As for the threat of government fiat monopolies, do you mean that most people just look at it from a pragmatic standpoint and think, they ain’t gonna let that happen?
If that’s the case I think it’s in a different class in the sense that critics have to at retreat to arguing with respect to outcome instead of correctness.
You seemed to have changed your definitions a bit. What is a currency exactly? Bitcoin is no longer used for buying and selling goods and services, and that's how I define it.
Negative real rates have been normalized in the fiat era, but that's possible because fractionally reserved banking means credit creation has zero opportunity cost. So there's no floor on rates, because any nominally positive rate is profitable to a lender who has infinite free credit creation potential.
I'm increasingly convinced that all the distortions of the current monetary system stem from fractionally reserved banking and zero opportunity cost credit creation. It's warped everyone's perception to the point that we can barely understand how a different system would function, because we've lost sight of what money really is and how it works.
I've been playing with the idea that sound money is more like equity, rather than like the credit we use as money today. I think raising capital in a deflationary currency system will be structured with a lot more equity and a lot less debt. Once a deflationary currency has fully monetized, equity will outperform just holding currency as long as the business makes a profit in nominal terms. And that would be the definition of a business that's adding value to the economy. If it can't do that, it's just destroying capital and the equity rightfully should fall to zero.
https://open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/money-as-equity?r=3i492j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web