A little deflation because of progress is a good thing but sadly the average consumer often doesn't benefit from deflated prices due to corruption of one sort or another. Bitcoin lowers costs for consumers and merchants and resists corruption.
Edit: regarding price climbing until resources are exhausted, well the target is 'all the money in the world and then some' (due to progress)
Edit: regarding price climbing until resources are exhausted, well the target is 'all the money in the world and then some' (due to progress)
I assure you, nothing resists corruption.
There is already ample evidence of corruption in Bitcoin, both in the early days and now.
Not that I couldn't see it happening Voodah, but can you give some examples of corruption in Bitcoin? Do you mean things like the pirate scandal or the recent inputs.io hack, or something more sinister?
Yeah, you just mentioned a couple but I'll throw in some more...
Early on, the operator (and also one of the bitcoin devs) of one of the biggest pools secretly diverted the pool's power (a lot) to at least one other sha-256 alt-coin to kill it (successfully).
A couple months back the now biggest pool (part of big mining scam to consumers if you ask me) was proven to have used it's majority power of the network to construct and successfully execute double-spendings. They only needed their 29% majority share of the network (and a less-than-secure victim). They now have 33%, no one is doing anything, the news doesn't get out and people keep buying GH at insane prices from them and giving them control over the network.
Just this last week, China and it's exchanges have given yet another example of on-going corruption which we cannot easily spot or control: volume and tape manipulation. Who can police an exchange?
As with all past human history, corruption is deeply engrained in the human behavior whenever a lot power falls in the hands of a few. As you can see, most of these cases appear on centralization points, making for yet another great argument on why we so badly need to protect descentralization at all costs.