What I want is an inflationary cryptocurrency, not a deflationary one. Make an actual currency, not something to speculate on.
This site is overwhelmingly negative towards Bitcoin, but I feel like the negativity would only make sense if you had to make a binary decision to put most of your wealth in Bitcoin or none of it.
Having just some Bitcoin say 5%, is a reasonable way to preserve your wealth against what I find to be a very opaque system of finance where a lot of trust is being placed in a handful of people to keep things running smoothly.
If the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, some crazy trade-conflict or other global unforeseen event takes place that results in unusual currency fluctuations, it's nice to have some of my wealth contained in a digitally secure global financial system.
A currency's supply needs to increase/decrease in response to what's circulating at this moment in time. If the overall supply is increasing but everybody is squirrelling it away or deleveraging debt positions, then you're still going to have deflationary effects. Case in point, roughly 20% of USD was minted in the last year or so, with pretty much no inflation. Similarly with something like Bitcoin, if some event were to trigger a spending/selling spree (or a debt bubble were to form) then you would have inflationary effects.
What's needed is coordination to increase/decrease the supply as needed. That could be done with some kind of decentralised voting system. But I'm not sure it could react fast enough in a crisis, or be able to direct the action to the right parts of an economy to avoid the kind of damage that takes decades to undo.
I too would like to see a cryptocurrency modeled on the idea that current democracies and their monetary systems aren‘t all bad: steady inflation, some degree of control over monetary policy for a state like body, programmable taxation... There are many thousands of projects in the space but somehow they all share a hardcore libertarian political orientation. I guess we‘ll let IBM contract with the ECB to build the future.
if that event happens, either it doesn't affect you that much, or it affects you so much that bitcoin will not help.
There's no scenario in-between those two, for which i can see bitcoin be the rescuing currency.
Unless you're not in the developed world of course - like in venezuela, or turkey (likely to start to hyperinflate due to mismanagement from their central bank). In that case, bitcoin makes perfect sense to own.
People keep complaining of the growing wealth gap, where inflationary currencies sit at the very center of the whole pyramid scheme. Look at what's happening in Venezuela or Lebanon.