I don't get why people are obsessed with inflation. It is not the only thing that is required to stimulate an economy. On the other hand for majority of developing nations, it is a sink hole that eats their earnings alive. You can still use a deflationary currency just like an inflationary one. Just use satoshis to track bitcoin increments. I'm sure if Zimbabwe was using bitcoin, they wouldn't have ended up in the shit hole they were a few years back.
Think about it: for every dollar you earn, the government can print its own one dollar to basically halve your earnings. Why would anyone want such a thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to invest in stocks/real estate and other inflation resistant things to beat inflation. You can hold your earnings in it and you are already beating inflation.
Significant inflation is obviously a bad thing. Zimbabwe or Venezuela prime examples. But being deflationary where the currency increases in value obviously causes a disincentive for spending that currency. You are encouraged to buy and hold it because it will be worth more in the future relative to the cost of goods, services, and other fist currencies.
Even just minor deflation is disastrous for economies because if there is 3% deflation, you could get 100% of what was generally typical GDP growth for developed countries without spending any money to produce anything. This encourages everyone to be risk averse towards spending money on anything at all.
Thus, monetary policy over the past century has settled on a steady but small amount of inflation as the ideal policy for balancing economic growth and unemployment.
> You are encouraged to buy and hold it because it will be worth more in the future relative to the cost of goods, services, and other fist currencies.
A currency being inflationary shouldn't really affect spending because lots of different investments already exist, so you can make money holding them instead of the dollar. The dollar being inflationary (or shouldn't, for rational actors) incentivizes trading it for something else, but not necessarily increase spending in unnecessary, depreciating, products.
> lots of different investments already exist, so you can make money holding them instead of the dollar
That's true, but someone has to end up holding the nominal assets.
Like yes, a saver can trade all their fiat currency for real assets by buying a house or stocks, but then the person who sold them those stocks would get hit by inflation. At the end of the day, if the 'real assets' in the economy are worth say $10 trillion and there is $1 trillion of currency in circulation, then whoever is holding those dollars will pay for the inflation.
Btw, the most common nominally-denominated asset is debt. Savers who hold debt (Treasuries, mortgages, etc.) get hit the most by inflation.
Even just minor deflation is disastrous for economies because if there is 3% deflation, you could get 100% of what was generally typical GDP growth for developed countries without spending any money to produce anything. This encourages everyone to be risk averse towards spending money on anything at all.
Here, prices fell slowly: 1-2%/year, caused by sharply rising productivity. The period was also called the Gilded Age, and it was a mixed bag economically. On one hand, the structure of American society dramatically changed through massive technological advance, consumer goods became abundant, and businesses who adopted those techniques became fabulously wealthy. OTOH, many small farmers went bankrupt and were forced to sell off their land to service debts they couldn't pay with money that was now more valuable than when they took out the debt. Ditto lower-class laborers, who were squeezed into tenements with dozens of families living together as their wages remained stagnant for a generation but their employers became fabulously wealthy and bought up much of the prime real estate.
The Long Depression is largely forgotten today (unless you're an economic history geek), but it was a prime impetus for the monetarist school of thought. The whole idea that the government needs to continually print money to catch up with rising productivity and availability of goods is largely based on the experience of the U.S. in the Long Depression, when they didn't print money.
Also, there's a good amount of evidence that our current period of history resembles the Long Depression a lot more than either the Great Depression or 1970s stagflation, and will play out in similar ways. I'd personally put us around the mid-1890s in terms of historical parallels.
The late Roman republic also fell into a deflationary spiral, as the currency was repeatedly debased by successive governments desperate to fund the military.
This triggered massive hoarding of currency, despite harsh legal measures that tried to outlaw it. Everyone had an incentive to hoard the old, higher silver coins while shunning the new debased coins being issued [1]. 'Bad money drives out good' [2].
Eventually, the majority of the Roman economy became demonetized, and people had to resort to barter again. Welcome to the feudal ages.
* Note that there is a confusion of terminology here -- things look inflationary if you are counting the number of coins it takes to buy something, but highly deflationary if you measure the amount of silver to buy the same item, as silver was sucked out of the economy and then hoarded.
From a certain perspective, both factors actually came together to destroy the late Roman monetary system -- the real 'store of value', silver, was removed from the system and hoarded because it was deflationary. And hyper-inflation in the fiat currency simultaneously made the coins totally worthless and therefore unsuitable for doing transactions.
Think about it: for every dollar you earn, the government can print its own one dollar to basically halve your earnings. Why would anyone want such a thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to invest in stocks/real estate and other inflation resistant things to beat inflation. You can hold your earnings in it and you are already beating inflation.