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Comment by Frogolocalypse | Hacker News Reader

> deflationary

? It is deflationary because it is known what the total number will be, and coins will be permanently lost over time.

> Any user who joins the network

They do this out of free choice do they not? No one is coerced into acquiring bitcoin. There isn't even a coordinating body, like a company, that controls the issuance or exchange of tokens. I would encourage any person that invests in anything to understand what they are investing in before they commit their funds to it. Bitcoin is extremely unforgiving if you don't manage your security well.

None of this has anything to do with your incorrect usage of words though. You can't just invent new definitions of words because you don't like something, and you think it would be nice to assign that word to it. You don't like it. Fair enough. Don't invest in it.

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Bitcoin is inflationary until the year 2140, and assuming no fork changes that sooner.

If you actually understand Satoshis algorithm and history you'll take notice at how the supply was intended to benefit the first few users to run the software during the brief phase of hyperinflation and production for minimal work, while later users are punished merely for running the same protocol and offering the same computational work equivalent to prior users.

If you consider how easy a linear curve could have been chosen by Satoshi instead of the reverse log curve, you'll understand the manipulative nature of how Bitcoin exploits new users.

The supply inflates every 10 minutes, this by definition is inflation.

The coin supply goes up until 2140 but unless it goes up faster than demand it will be deflationary.

You presume that the future was predictable in 2009. Satoshi had no way of knowing whether the Bitcoin experiment would truly work or not. How many times have we thought, "Bitcoin is surely dead" due to some Mt Gox / Silk Road / China ban scandal? It's crazy to call the people who stuck it out and believed in the coin "exploitative" when they lost 90% of their value time and time again and still did not sell.

Production costs of 50BTC per every 10 minutes has historically been a fractions of or a few pennies. Only for later users has the cost gradually increased.

The way you and many others approach Bitcoin as a tool to horde and sell to other rubes is indicative of the manipulative design where unsuspecting new users don't understand the history.

Historically? 50BTC every 10 minutes for pennies? Those prices haven't been seen since 2012 or earlier.

If you don't like Bitcoin's model, choose another altcoin to back, there's dozens of them and some of them even have inflationary models. No one is forcing anyone to buy into anything.

> The supply inflates every 10 minutes, this by definition is inflation.

Well, it's inflation of the money supply, but (while certain fringe groups confuse the issue) that's not what “inflation” alone normally refers to, which is instead price inflation, which is approximately inflation in the ratio of money supply to the utility-weighted size of the market.

>The supply inflates every 10 minutes, this by definition is inflation.

Precisely, I see BTC being called deflationary all the time, when really it's just not exponentially inflationary, but logarithmically.

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