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Comment by pimmen | Hacker News Reader

A related issue is that most crypto currencies are deflationary. This makes people not want to spend them and they become poor currencies because they stifle economic activity.

You can easily prove me wrong, too; use your crypto currencies to invest in something that increases economic activity (such as shares in companies).

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This is an oft-repeated falsehood. The majority of cryptos I have looked at (the big, non-pre-mined ones in particular) are not and will not be for many, many years. They are disinflationary. They experience inflation at a decreasing rate over time. Eventually, yes, they will become deflationary. Bitcoin will become deflationary on or before (effectively owing to "lost" coins) 2140, but until then the monetary supply increases. That is called: inflation.

If the amount of goods and services you can purchase with the currency increases over time, the currency is deflationary. Disinflation is a slow down in the decrease of the currency value, but if the value of the currency is increasing it’s deflating.

> This is an oft-repeated falsehood

Inflation is a measure between real goods and services on one hand and a single unit of a currency on the other. It is not a measure of money supply. (For that we say “money supply”.)

Money supply increases tend to be inflationary. But that’s not a hard and fast rule. Bitcoin’s money supply is increasing, but on average it’s been deflating.

Cryptocurrencies are often used to fund companies. That is what many ICOs are, though many are also scams. Just because you can’t buy stock doesn’t mean that people don’t buy equity in other ways using cryptocurrencies.

Almost all the ICO's are scams. And the ones that aren't are mostly destined to fail too.

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