Making an inelastic resource (gold) the unit of exchange in a growing economy is a recipe for deflation. You don't want the most economically sensible decision to be holding onto capital, since that results in precisely nothing useful being done.
In the 1980's and 1990's computer industry, your dollars could buy a lot more megahertz or megabytes every year.
If the "deflation = bad" people were correct, everyone should have held onto their dollars waiting for next year's tech, knowing it would be a lot better than this year's tech. No one should have wanted to buy computers, and the tech industry should have been in a gigantic depression.
Broad-based deflation due to a lack of money to buy goods and services is bad.
A little inflation means that your currency buys stuff _today_ that's worth more than hoarding it for _tomorrow_, so you spend, vitalizing the economy.
The reality is, it needs to be balanced. There needs to be enough money in circulation such that economic activity is not stymied, but not so much that it starts price wars.
Kinda like blood sugar!
Currency inflation leads to unfair distribution because the value of financial assets grows faster than the real economy (it inflates).
Currency deflation benefits the poorer. As technology and productivity grow, it costs less to produce goods, so their prices should decrease.
The currency hoarding behavior that you describe is no different than today’s financial investment.
It is trivially easy to avoid the effects of inflation by investing - if you have assets to invest, that is. But if you live month to month, you get screwed by inflation, because your salary is sticky as prices rise.