Except no one does this. Inflation is usually measured on a yearly rolling basis.


I love how every anti-establishment thinker is credited with these idiotic definitions. Guess what? That is not Ron Paul's definition, because he's not an idiot out to confuse people--he's out to educate them and commonly calls inflation a form of theft. Calling it an "expansion of the monetary supply" does absolutely nothing to educate the uneducated any more about what is actually going on. It perpetrates stupidity by causing confusion of terms that are well-defined and usually include the cause.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/inflation

2. (Economics) Economics a progressive increase in the general level of prices brought about by an expansion in demand or the money supply (demand-pull inflation) or by autonomous increases in costs (cost-push inflation)

Calling inflation an "expansion of the money supply" only still does nothing to explain what is really going on. So everyone who tries to use inflation in this manner, or tries to "educate" people on this definition, is making everyone stupider for it.

Deflation, on the other hand, makes no sense to be used in the sense of a reduction in the "physical" supply of currency due to it being lost. In terms of money, it has *always* been used to mean a reduction in the available amount of currency. The amount of available currency can change at any given time based on economic factors, and it will likely always overwhelm the concept of lost coins meaning deflation and further confusion of terms employed only in bitcoinomics. You will never find an Austrian that has ever used the term to mean as such.

Definitions of words should not be used to obfuscate the fact that bitcoin is intended to be higly deflationary--to use them in such a way is to commit the same intellectual crime as the establishment so reviled.