As a closing knockout blow, the author states that an economy that is deflationary would require workers to take a pay cut every year. Again, this is a change in paradigm that the author fails to understand. With fiat, inflation FORCES you to take a pay cut every year. With BTC, deflation FORCES you to take a pay raise every year. This means with fiat, the employer has to keep giving you empty pay raises to keep up. With BTC, your employer has to keep giving you empty pay cuts to keep up. Neither system is better, but it is a total 180 degree paradigm shift.
Exactly. The author is rejecting bitcoin on the assumption that society cannot adjust to changes, reasoning which is historically ludicrous.
Of course, the author is also saying a growing economy would be mismatched with a shrinking (deflationary) currency supply.
For traditional central banking to provide a good store of value, we would need truly responsible governments accurately adjusting their fiat money supply to agree with growth or contraction of their economies. But governments aren't trustworthy long-term.
Cryptocurrency could be designed to inflate & deflate based on one sector of one country's economy (such as food or electronics or housing), so that over time a coin would tend to still buy the same quantity of the favored products/services. It would be the extreme opposite of a global currency.
Or a currency could inflate/deflate to agree with the world's average economic growth/contraction. That would add a layer of complexity and risk, in order to make prices somewhat stable over time for those in the largest economies.
Bitcoin's approach is simpler and quite rational but does require users to reprice products and services gradually over time. Long term, price changes are far more likely to become PREDICTABLE with bitcoin than under the whims of governments!
Bitcoin is still an experiment and there's flexibility for adjustments in the future. We've already experienced a fork of the blockchain to solve a flaw... There's no reason we couldn't make Bitcoin whatever we needed it to be in the future. All it would take to implement a change is for the change to be desirable for the miners/users.
We aren't at a stage where a problem is evident, nor can we actually be sure that a Bitcoin economy will suffer the same shortfalls of a gold standard. There's no reason to change anything right now and so a proposed change will be resisted by the people.