Deflation, love hate, debt, Bitcoin
3 min readSep 3, 2021
I originally wrote this as a response to
I love this:"instead of trying to stop deflation at all cost, we embrace it?" I would love it if we would let the natural deflation persist(I have no debt). If we stopped pumping money into the economy. I also understand why it can't be allowed to happen. Do you? Let me try to explain.In a deflationary environment existing debt would be a horrible trap and new lending would be much decreased. If you have debt in a deflationary environment you have to pay principal and interest with an increasingly valuable currency. In an inflationary environment you get to pay back your loans with a less valuable currency. In a deflationary environment interest rates would be negative for all but the most risky investments. That is something that would be hard to get used to.A funny thing what would happen is that if you lent money to someone who is paying negative interest then on the books it would show as a loss, no income from that transaction so no taxes would be owed. Same deal for capital gains, if you bought a house in a deflationary environment and sold it a decade later you would show a long term capital loss. In both these cases you only have paper losses because your investments gained value even though you showed dollar losses, the dollars you got in return were worth a lot more than the dollars you invested. You have real gains in inflation/deflation adjusted terms even though you got to "book" a loss.I have a problem with this but I think it is semantics and definitions not substance."Those who are building the blockchain and the Bitcoin network are playing the infinite game because they create new and simpler forms of technologies that the analog world couldn’t deliver in a fast, cheap, and decentralized way."First this presents the current monetary structures as "analog" which is incorrect they might be centralized but they are digital, computerized, electronic ledgers, not analog. The existing systems are faster and cheaper than any of the decentralized blockchains but they are centralized and under government control.Some powerful forces for world order would be undermined by widespread adoption of a decentralized blockchain monetary system outside government controls. I suspect this has already happened and there is no going back. The biggest one is any monetary sanctions imposed by the worlds central banks can now easily be circumvented. Iran, Russian Oligarchs, North Korea, ISS, billionaires can now accept and make payments electronically that before required hard currency or gold. They can put their money outside the reach of governments. I might personally like that but I understand it is double edged sword.TEK
It seem to me I should try to get it a little more attention.
TEK
