If nothing else, watching the up's and down's of Bitcoin is a motivation to think about what life would be like in an economy where currency is volatile.
I remember my parents getting their paychecks and running with me and my brother to the supermarket which was CROWDED to get the whole month supermarket done. If you waited 3 days or so you would not be able to buy all the food you needed.
It is terrible I can assure you that.
Here is the kind of inflation I am talking about.
"It stayed in the 100% level until the mid-80's and then grew to more than 1000% a year, reaching a record 5000% in 1993." Wikipedia.
Start with this: you owe 10% of your income this year as payment for debt. Suppose this is a mortgage and you'll be paying the same amount for the next 15 or 30 years.
Assume that under either inflation or deflation your salary/income changes each year with the inflation/deflation rate. [1]
Inflation rate of 3%
Deflation rate of 3%
Year two: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 9.70%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 10.30%.
Year ten: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 7.66%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 13.05%.
[1] We already know this isn't true for many people under inflation, though it hopefully averages out to better than inflation over several years (between bonuses, pay raises, pay bumps from changing jobs). The same will likely be true under deflation.
Not only that, but there are plenty of people whose businesses need to take on short-term loans to remain competitive. Maybe your business is profitable but you do not have enough capital to fill a really big order -- which could be a great opportunity for your business to grow. If you are not going to take on any debt, then the really big order will be given to your competition, and eventually your business will fail.
Debt is not universally bad; there are a lot of cases where debts make sense. Debt is bad when you cannot repay it, which is why deflation is bad.
It also wouldn't be the end of debt - just the end of the ridiculous debt-for-life system that most people live like today.
You are assuming that the richest people in the market would not have any income at all. I think that assumption is pretty dubious. Sure, they will spend some money; but all they would need to do is balance their budget, and they would remain rich perpetually since the currency has a fixed supply. In fact, if their income was larger than their spending, they would actually become wealthier over time, as they removed more and more money from the market and took advantage of deflationary effects.
The GFC being the a chain reaction started by ~2% less borrowing you say ? Nah, that won't happen "this time".
Like it or not, our economy is based on forgiving debt at the rate of inflation. And it's better than what came before. Can we please stop deluding everyone else ?
A fertile environment for a currency ruled by the laws of nature and math rather than assholes and exploiters.
Bitcoin is the solution to none of these problems. You cant buy rice or bread with bitcoin in Africa, let's be serious now.
Yet.
In the end, the only people who know you did this are people in this reddit thread, and your userid is semi-anonymous.
The point of his response was that the extreme currency fluctuations led to prices constantly changing, as much as several times a day. (I had a client that once did business in Zimbabwe. On a trip to meet with local business partners in 2007, he purchased a meal outside the airport for roughly $1 billion Zimbabwean dollars. On his way back to the airport that afternoon, that same meal cost $10 million ZDs!)
The inevitable result of hyper-volatility in either direction is that market participants will simply resort to using alternative currencies that are more stable and more predictable. This is a problem for Bitcoin since it is an alternative currency.