Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Is the 21 million bitcoin limit unchangeable?
by
kjj
on 22/03/2013, 18:07:00 UTC
I know that some bitcoin enthusiasts prefer bitcoin over FIAT-currencies since it cannot be printed when 21 million is reached vs fiat currencies such as the Zimbabwe Dollar...

But you hate inflation on wrong reasons - the fiat inflation of fiat is bad because we cannot predict politicians or central bank behaviour. Bitcoin algorithm is the opposite, it is predictable and I dont see any problem with an built-in inflation of X % per annum for infinity, therefore inflation in cryptocurrencies is nothing bad. It prevents hording.
And it encourages spending bitcoin so that the bitcoin economy can grow!

No, no, no.  It isn't unpredictability that we dislike, it is inflation.  Once again, you are making straw men and fighting with them.  To talk of saving (hoarding) as a vice and consumption (spending) as a virtue is totally backwards from the way that most of us view things.

I'll summarize, but you really should be searching and reading.  Once again, there are literally hundreds of threads on this topic.

Deflation is the natural result of improvement.  When someone builds a machine to make a task easier, that task should get cheaper.  That is, it should take less value, regardless of the form of value, to do.  At best, inflation is capable of obfuscating this truth from us, making it harder for us to make good decisions, and at worst, it transfers our saved value to others (also known as theft).