I hope they still have the private key.
See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well.
For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
Indeed. Credit is money; ultimately anyone can expand the money supply with an IOU.
My thought on this would be a dynamicaly stable currency. estimate debt and transaction activity, and the more debt and more liquid activity there is, the more deflationary currency should be. the less debt there is, and the less of a percentage of the money is actually in-use, the more inflationary the currency should be. this, though, is fairly off-the-cuff.
..balance in all things. Neither being completely stingy, individually, nor being excessively spendy will benefit us, individually or collectively. ..but there are times for either.
I wonder if there's a way to quantify that and put a variable on the conditions, and have an inflationary/deflationary currencynthat is dynamically stable depending on conditions.
..i mean, individually, most people will eventually spend, if they have much saved and it benefits them to do so. but occasionally, we do need a kick in the pants. whenever the economynis in gridlock, that's the time for inflation. ..but when people are spending excessively, it's a time for deflation, which discourages taking on debt, and pushes the economy towards real wealth. rewarding long-term thinkers is valuable, and has a very broad effect on society.
The Japanese Lost Decade?
Greece Debt Crisis?
For a decade before Black Thursday,there had been many things that were signs that the economy was having trouble even if the "Roaring Twenties" made it seem like everything was fine.
IMO the largest issue was that American farm sector was teetering on the edge because of the dramatic drop in crop prices. This deflation screwed over farmers who mechanized with lots of debt, which because of said deflation, became impossible to pay off.
The fed also implemented rate hikes to curb speculation right before 1929 which froze up credit contributing to deflation
The problem of the Great Depression was NOT the stock market crash, it arguably wasn't even the real start, just the most "spectacular" one. The problem was that with the entire economy deflating, it caused a massive downward spiral that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was why the Govt went to extreme lengths to try and figure out how to raise prices, which is why you get programs to pay farmers to NOT grow food, and mass killings of pigs and cows and other farm animals, even as the farmers who raised those lifestock went hungry.
So no, speculation was not the problem, it just sparked the key issue of the fact that the economy was deflation uncontrolled, but was just hidden.
>...that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was just bad policy by the Fed. The Fed had the legal authority to be the lender of last resort and could have prevented the bank failures. Many explanations have been given over the years as to why the Fed didn't provide liquidity. Because the Fed failed to supply emergency liquidity, the U.S. money supply plummeted by nearly 30% over the next couple of years, which essentially turned what likely would have been a recession into the Great Depression.
This is not to say the gold standard was not a problem. During the 1930's, leaving the gold standard was one of the few good moves done to help the economy by the federal government.
This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.
First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth. Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world. Worst thing is that you gain less money on day N+100 vs day N, but it does not mean you lose money or stop gaining it.
So then you need an investment; you're going to have to return a multiple of the deflation rate since the risk of your supermarket shutting down is probably higher than the currency changing course.
So how are you going to build the supermarket?
> Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world.
If it needs to give you more money than just saving the investment (which it should, you need to be rewarded for the risk or you would just save the money), obviously the profit margin has to be higher than it currently is, which would increase prices.
So you'd be working for 0.000000000000000001 coins per day at the amazon warehouse, while Bezos has 500000 coins because he was born with them. There would never be a way for you to get 500000 coins, because there are only 20m coins in existence.
Running a super market involves owning physical goods for some period of time. With deflation, the price you can sell those goods for drops while you are holding them. In fact most economic activity involves paying for inputs (labor, materials, etc) and then later getting paid for your outputs. Deflation directly impacts profitability and can cause losses.
Since deflation causes demand to drop as economic actors wisely choose to start hoarding currency and buying less, this causes a feedback loop where deflation can spiral.
Similarly, inflation causes demand to increase since holding currency is unwise and it is better to spend or invest that currency than hold onto it.
These two patterns mean that the neutral state (no inflation or deflation) is unstable as any deviation above or below starts a feedback loop until things fall apart. This is the boom and bust economic cycle that modern monetary management is supposed to ameliorate.
Given that you want economic growth, the best solution is to try to stabilize around a small fixed amount of inflation. Arguing for the end of inflation is arguing for the end of economic growth.
To put it another way, the model you're presenting reads well in an economics textbook and I'm sure is exactly how we justify our MMT social policy but it doesn't fully account for actual human behavior. I'll buy necessities (house/food/water/electric/communication) even in a deflationary economy.
When was the last time you went to the grocery store and thought "I better buy this milk today because my money will have less spending power tomorrow"?
They might, however, ask whether they need a car with 30% profit margins or one with closer to 10%.
I don't think the grand social goal is to maximize economic growth. It's a stable healthy society.
Right now it really just feels like people spend on whatever the hell they want to without any thought whatsoever. Consume. Yes good, consuuuume. I'd trade slower economic growth for more responsible spending...
The contentious part of that statement is what constitutes "healthy" and "stable". Look at Japan, stuck in a long deflationary period that looks like it will end very badly and is already going badly. They are very stable though.
That, for me, makes growth look much more tempting as a choice for what constitutes healthy.
A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.
> For most of human history the money was stable
Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.
The ratio of one ounce of gold to one productive beef cow has held for a hundred years, and plausibly for around 5,000 years.
A single ounce of gold could purchase a quality tunic, sandals, and belt in Ancient Rome and still buys a fine tailored suit in the modern era.
https://findbullionprices.com/blog/gold-purchasing-power-wha...
(Rome definitely had inflation crises!)
>For most of human history the money was stable.
Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.
The right maount of money is the amount of money we as normal humans need to work with (buying and selling stuff).
Inflation and deflation are results of too much money or too little money in comparision to the production capability of a society.
If i save today for my retirement and money gets less valuable when i'm retired, i have to give more 'saved' capacity back to get the real capacity (people taking care of me) and if i have more value, the others have to do more for me.
Controlling this is 'work' from experts and is not solved by bitcoin btw.
Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.
However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.
But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).
Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.
Only true if you zoom out. If you actually looked the data the 1800s had wild and constant swings year to year, they just evened out during the Long Depression (i.e. the first Great Depression) by the end of the century.
Constrained monetary supply also leads to constant boom and bust cycles in a non static economy.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.
Or rather the majority of actual users. Hard forks occur because people install and use the updated clients. If 90% of the miners decide to mine on the “bad” chain, but 90% of users switch to the “good” one instead, the “good” would likely still win out in terms of market cap and recognition (and the miners would naturally have to follow).
The opposite is also true – most miners have stayed on the “official” chain :-) I do agree that having more hashpower helps, but ultimately all users (including miners) determine the price on the market.
The odd part is, the governance model is not defined. At the end of the day, some person or group has to decide what the new "real" Bitcoin is and the average holder just has to go along with it.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?