The Bank of Canada found that a Bitcoin based economy would have the same amount of drag as a 48% rate of inflation [1].

A 2% rate of inflation is trivial in the near term, and in the long term encourages productive allocation of capital. Inflation literally only matters to people sitting on cash -- and that's the point! If you invest it in anything inflation stops mattering and the constant-dollar return starts to matter.

[1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp20...

"If you have cash, you should gamble it by investing it in stocks or business."

but that's risking the money I earned. I don't want to risk it, I earned it, I just want to save it and not have it evaporate over the years.

We at least know the names of big corporations. Otherwise "we're forced to play the BitCoin game which just consolidates power to big anonymous holders and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind".

85% of the BitCoins have already been mined. It's beyond the reach of people to participate in mining. What's left is pure speculation, based on the available supply. There's also a "culture" of HODL which means the actual exchange rate is determined by very few (big) sellers.

Wouldn't it be better if your money (that was BitCoin <sic>) increased 2% a year instead of decreased 2% a year?

Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.

Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much").

However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger. So there is also the causality "inflation -> create more money".

At the same time, there are other factors that can drive inflation, such as workers and companies exercising price setting power (which Econ 101 likes to pretend doesn't exist, but plays an important role in the real world).

So yeah, the causality that you're casually throwing out there hasn't actually been proven as the driving factor here.

At the same time, the widespread belief in it and similar misunderstandings causes us as a society to make extremely damaging macroeconomic policy decisions, in particular the decision to attempt to fight recessions using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy.

We had 4 years with 4x the reward, 4 years with 2x the reward, and about 3 years with the current reward, which makes for 1/(4x4+4x2+3) = 1/27 inflation.

I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation

You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.

The bitcoin guy is not going to accept 1 Zimbabwe dollar to 1 USD any more than your black market dealer who has USD. The real currency conversion rate is the problem, not the act of obtaining actual hard currency.

yes, there are a lot of fungible ways to transfer hard currency over the internet... once you acquire it.

again: acquiring it is the hard part, because nobody wants to trade a zimbabwe dollar for a USD.

Bitcoin does nothing to help your zimbabwe dollars be less worthless than they are in USD, therefore they don't help the currency conversion process at all.