One of the weird things about our world is that money is central to everything, but it’s hard to understand how it works. There’s a great deal of handwaving around how, for example, dollars are created, much of which is, in fact, not correct at all (most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand).
The big flaw of Bitcoin, to my mind, is that it is an inherently deflationary currency. Deflation is one of those things that seems great on the surface: prices go down, not up, but when that happens it ends up creating an economic incentive to avoid spending since why buy something today if it will be cheaper tomorrow, and this ends up causing economic activity to slow down or stop entirely. A small amount of inflation, on the other hand creates an incentive to either spend money or invest it in something that will provide a better than inflation return, whether that’s putting it in a high-yield savings vehicle or making capital or financial investments. With deflation, you can just leave your funds in cash (where they will not provoke any economic growth) and get a return.
> most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand
Fractional reserve banking. Basically, bankers start getting very anxious when they see the masses of people depositing mountains of cash into them. They look at the cash hoard they have suddenly amassed and think, we can't just leave this pile of cash here doing nothing, we have to efficiently allocate all of this capital. So they lend it out to people who need cash, charge interest and pay account holders their yields.
Deposit $100. Bank loans out $90, and $10 sits in its reserves. Your account still says $100, even though the bank is now leveraged against loans to third parties. Guy who took the $90 loan pays some bills, and that $90 ends up deposited right back into the same bank. So it keeps $9 and loans out $81. There is now $100 + $90 + $81 in circulation, but only that $100 is real money, the rest are all made up. They only become real when loans are repaid. So, the $81 gets spent, deposited back into the bank, and so on, and so forth, expanding the money supply like a fractal until the amounts become too infinitesimal to track. Thus $1,000 easily becomes $100,000 literally overnight. Government could run its presses 24/7 and it would not be able to outcompete the banks when it comes to inflating the money supply.
Banks are the financial call stacks of society. Better hope there aren't any exceptions (defaults), or the whole thing unwinds and comes crashing down.
It's like a society wide financial version of ISP oversubscription. The assumption is nobody is going to stress test the system by saturating the link 24/7. Everything breaks the second the invariants are violated. Banks similarly assume that not everybody will need all of their dollars immediately, which lets them "efficiently allocate" all of those dollars. Entire government systems exist just to bail out the banks where this assumption fails to be load bearing.
It's amazing this myth continues when the Bank of England debunked it in 2014. [0]
[0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
Allen Farrington makes a solid case in this essay [1] about deflation being the more effective mode of economy.
[1]: http://x.com/i/article/2045147796752175104
I thought private banks create money the moment they take out a credit from the central bank. The central bank's job is to set the interest rate for those loans, et viola.
That's one method, but consider what happens when someone deposits a million dollars at a bank. This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage, and guess where that person accepts that money? That's right, a bank. That same 1 million dollars could be lent out to 10 different people, expanding the supply of money many times over. The only limit to this are the capitalisation ratios legislated and enforced by government (the bank must retain some % of total outstanding liabilities as capital it can move immediately). There are a few other ways I understand (and probably many more I dont) that the monetary supply can be expanded via, but that is the simplest one to conceptualise.
"This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage"
It can't. It isn't. And it never has been.
What banks do is provide liquidity against your collateral. You sell them a charge over your house (for example), and they give you a credit for it. That credit can then be passed on to other people.
Banks are in the business of discounting. They don't take anything in and give it out to other people. [0]
[0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
I’d argue that this is more of a feature than a bug.
The assumption behind the “deflation is bad” argument is that spending itself is the goal. But spending is not automatically good. Productive spending and productive investment are good. Wasteful consumption, speculation, and forced risk-taking are not.
If money holds its value, people become more selective. They still buy food, housing, tools, entertainment, experiences, and things they genuinely want. Humans have needs, preferences, status impulses, advertising pressure, and finite lives. Demand does not disappear just because money is sound. What disappears is some of the artificial urgency to spend before your cash loses value.
The more important point is investment. In an inflationary system, holding money is punished, so everyone is pushed out onto the risk curve. You are not only investing because an opportunity is great; you are investing because the currency is being diluted and you need to escape it. That distorts the real cost of capital and makes mediocre investments look better than they are in nominal terms.
With harder money, investment has to beat the return of simply holding the money. That is a healthy hurdle rate. Capital should have to prove that it creates real value. If an investment only makes sense because the denominator is being debased, or because everyone is forced into assets to avoid inflation, then maybe that investment was not as productive as it looked.
This also matters for inequality. Inflation does not hit everyone equally. People with capital can protect themselves by owning stocks, real estate, ETFs, businesses, and other assets. They can diversify, borrow against assets, and ride asset inflation. Poorer people are more likely to hold wages and cash, so they are the ones whose purchasing power gets diluted first. Then they are told to “just invest,” but they are competing against people who already have capital, better access, better tax treatment, and more room to take risk.
So inflationary money quietly forces the poor to compete with the rich on the rich person’s playing field: asset ownership. A broad ETF may look like a safe wealth-preservation tool for someone with money, but for someone living paycheck to paycheck, the need to buy risk assets just to avoid being diluted is itself a problem.
A deflationary or hard-money system would probably reduce some marginal consumption and speculative investing. But that is not obviously bad. It may mean fewer bad investments, less artificial asset inflation, and more pressure for capital to flow only into things that genuinely outperform money itself. It would also be much more sustainable, not just economically but materially: if money no longer pressures everyone to consume and invest constantly just to outrun debasement, there is less incentive to waste real-world resources on unnecessary production, overconsumption, and short-lived goods.
The fear is that nobody would spend. But people do not stop buying things just because they expect their money to hold value. They stop buying things that are not worth giving up good money for. That sounds like discipline, not economic failure.
In a deflationary system, rich people just hold money, and earn more in interest from holding the money, than everyone else earns combined. They use that interest to buy things from the poor while not producing or investing themselves. Poor people realize if they switch currencies they can have more things because they don't have to give a percentage of everything to the rich. This makes the system unstable.
Bitcoin might be approaching it.
Spending shouldn't be the goal, but exchange of goods and services should be. Representation of real value should be a goal. If you can receive real goods and services as a consequence of holding numbers on a spreadsheet, instead of a consequence of providing real goods and services yourself, the economy has a problem. Maybe a system with zero inflation or very slight deflation can be stable, but the extreme deflation seen in Bitcoin is destabilising.
This still does not work.
“Holding money and earning interest from holding it” is a category error. Holding Bitcoin pays zero yield. No coupon, no dividend, no debtor, no tax stream, and no mechanism by which poor people pay holders a percentage. If someone earns interest, they are not merely holding money; they are lending it, which means they are taking risk and providing capital.
The “numbers on a spreadsheet” objection is also just an objection to money itself. Money exists so someone can produce value today, save the claim, and exchange it later for real goods and services. That is not a bug. That is saving.
A non-inflationary currency is actually a better representation of real value, because the unit is not constantly being diluted. Inflationary money lets nominal wealth rise even when no real value was created. Hard money makes the test harsher: did you actually create value, or did the measuring stick just get worse?
And no, people would not “just sit on Bitcoin.” People still eat, rent, travel, build, compete, seek status, start companies, buy homes, and take risks to outperform others. The only thing that changes is the hurdle rate: an investment has to be better than simply holding money. That is not economic failure. That is discipline.
The fair criticism of Bitcoin is volatility and unequal distribution, not this imaginary mechanism where holders magically receive interest from the poor by owning spreadsheet entries. That mechanism does not exist.
EDIT: The rich/poor angle is almost backwards. In an inflationary system, holding money is a guaranteed loss, so ordinary people are forced to become amateur investors just to avoid being debased. Rich people are already positioned for that: they own assets, businesses, real estate, equities, and can borrow cheaply against them.
In a non-inflationary or hard-money system, simply holding money is not a guaranteed losing strategy. You keep your share unless you voluntarily take risk to increase it. That is a very different game. The rich can still get richer, but they have to outperform by allocating capital well, not merely by being closest to the asset-inflation machine.
Same with wages. Under inflation, your employer can cut your real salary without saying anything: they just give you a raise below inflation, or no raise at all. You have to fight constantly just to stay even.
Under hard money, that hidden pay cut is much harder. If prices are falling or money is appreciating, keeping the same nominal salary can mean your real wage rises. To reduce your real compensation, the employer has to make the cut explicit or offset it with benefits. That is a completely different power dynamic.
So no, inflation is not obviously pro-poor. Very often it is a quiet tax on people least able to escape cash and wages.
Money is time. The time that’s passed isn’t as good as right now.
Real value deteriorates due to entropy. If I harvested some lettuce this week, in a year I don't still have lettuces - I have a pile of stinky mush. Keeping value steady requires a continual input of effort.
I'd accept "leaky currency" as a substitute for inflation. The important thing about inflation is that you have to keep running just to stay in one place - not that the numbers keep going up. Stable prices are nice, I agree on that.
Bitcoin's volatility is caused by its deflationary nature. Monero is inflationary, and much less volatile.
In an inflationary system, normal people are forced to keep earning money. "Becoming amateur investors" is your way to say "keep generating real value". If you want to surpass Elon Musk you have to invest, but that's nothing to do with the inflationary currency. That's because Elon Musk uses deflationary currencies like land and Ponzi currencies like Tesla stock. He just sits on them, and he will get out of the Ponzi ones before the top because he controls them. As they say, bad money drives out good. But you cannot build a stable economy on hyper-volatile gambling.
Monero is disinflationary, not inflationary. The rate of new coin emission is only enough to maintain equilibrium with the rate of coins being lost (due to people losing wallet keys, etc.). So your comment about being forced to keep earning doesn't apply to Monero.
The price is intended to decrease. If people are losing money (causing the price to increase) at the same rate the price decreases that's on them.
This mixes up real depreciation with monetary debasement.
Lettuce rotting is not an argument for money rotting. Perishable goods decay, machines depreciate, buildings need maintenance, and inventories have storage costs. Prices can reflect all of that. The measuring unit does not also need to decay.
Money is not supposed to preserve lettuce. It is supposed to preserve a claim on value across time. If I produce value today and save the proceeds, I should not be forced to lose purchasing power just because the unit of account was designed to leak.
Also, “forced to keep earning money” and “forced to become an investor” are not the same thing. In every system, people have to keep producing if they want to keep consuming. The difference is that under inflation, even after producing and saving, your savings are diluted unless you buy risk assets. That does not necessarily mean “generating real value.” Often it just means bidding up existing assets.
Bitcoin’s volatility is not simply “caused by deflation.” It is caused by uncertain demand, adoption cycles, liquidity, leverage, regulation, speculation, and the fact that it is still monetizing. A fixed supply makes price more sensitive to demand shocks, sure, but that is not the same as saying deflation mechanically causes volatility. Monero’s tail emission is also tiny, under 1% and declining over time, so it is hardly a normal inflationary currency.
And the Elon Musk example basically proves the opposite point. Rich people already escape inflation by holding scarce assets: land, equity, businesses, real estate. Poor people are the ones stuck holding wages and cash. A harder money system does not eliminate inequality, but it at least stops making cash itself a guaranteed melting ice cube.
>In a deflationary system, rich people just hold money, and earn more in interest from holding the money, than everyone else earns combined.
Wrong, in a 'deflationary' system the more a rich person holds money in proportion to the total money the less interest they are likely to extract/get. If they hold all the money interest they will be effectively get/extract will be zero.
> But spending is not automatically good. Productive spending and productive investment are good. Wasteful consumption, speculation, and forced risk-taking are not. That is indeed a great distinction that you have pointed out.
I think it's good to remember neither saving nor spending is the goal. The goal is productive real activity. Money is a means to get there.
Your entire post is flawed by a giant mistake: thinking that money has any intrinsic value.
Money doesn't have any value, none, zero.
Unless you like watching a piece of paper with Washington or the Queen of England or landmarks in Europe on it, so at least it could hold a value of "I can look at it/burn it".
It's value is none, zero.
That's true both for fiat and crypto.
They are absolutely, inherently, worthless.
The value is given by third parties wanting that money. That's the only reason it has a value.
And your country making some currency (generally its own) the legal tender ensures that that specific currency is used to trade in that country thus reinforcing this "value".
To me the entire idiocy of the crypto cultists is not understanding that money is worthless.
Even the richest people on the planet have very little of it. Their wealth is tied to owning assets be it estate, shares, art, cars, whole companies, funds, etc.
Money is worthless, you're at the mercy of other people wanting it tomorrow or in one year or in 10, and at the mercy of what the market will decide it is worth.
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