What I take issue with more than anything else is the idea of a private business expropriating money from people based on the contents of their speech, as a change of contractual policy, buried deep in the terms of service, that many laypeople cannot be reasonably expected to read and comprehensively understand.
I'm also concerned about this policy being weaponized by bad actors. Say someone impersonates a PayPal user online and posts genuine hate speech, complete with calls to violence. Or someone sends a payment to an innocent PayPal user with a memo that implies the PayPal user was engaged in hateful or malicious conduct. What happens when someone is having a mental health crisis and says some awful things on Twitter due to genuine mental health issues? What happens if a PayPal user's online account on another platform is hacked and used to post hateful content? What safeguards are in place to ensure that only those who are actually guilty are financially penalized?
By contrast sometime around 2140 the final Bitcoin will be mined, and we're already reducing the number mined per block. Inflation can still happen for reasons besides supply, but it's generally much less probable.
To me, it sounds like someone is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith for them to suggest that there are no digital currencies which are non-inflationary. BTC will never exceed 21 million bitcoins in circulation.
To address your other concern - the "problem" being addressed is a private company seizing your money over the contents of your speech. With self-custody of digital currencies like Bitcoin, it is not possible for third parties to expropriate your funds, provided you have protected your private key.
It's fine to dislike crypto, there are valid reasons, but let's be factual here.
You own your body. Your labor is just you consciously deciding to operate your body in a manner that fulfills the needs of someone else in exchange for something of value. The value of your money being diluted is, for the worker, no different from wage theft by an employer - the rightful compensation from your productive labor being taken from you without your consent.
Those rights are not a given either. In fact this is a first time I hear those are "rights".
If I pick an apple from a tree using my productive labor, somehow apple doesn't seem to care about my rights and starts to rot.
Are you sure you're not confusing rights with desires?
Inflation is a tax, albeit an indirect one. It decreases purchasing power of the citizens (with the greatest harm incurred by the most vulnerable), it decreases the value of the nominal debt held by the government, and it's produced outside of a democratic process (federal reserve is, in theory, independent - not subject to the demands of politicians, who, in theory, represent the interests of the people).
A tax that nobody voted for, that harms the poor and helps the government is nothing like the natural decay of an apple. It's value being taken from you without your consent, not unlike a mugger taking value from your wallet in the form of the currency itself.
Many people engage in labor in exchange for value, denominated in currency. Theft of the value of the currency, ultimately, boils down to theft of labor.
Most results of the productive output decay same way as apple does.
If you trade iPhone for a car, both car and iPhone will lose value over time. But in your world if you trade iPhone for $1000, only iPhone will lose value. That doesn't seem fair.
Furthermore, you're saying it harms most vulnerable, but I don't believe it is generally true.
If both a billionaire and a salaried working class person lose 10% of their wealth, gap between the two shrinks. Of course, laws of nature are such that rich are getting richer, but that's a different story.
Plus, flatly rejecting the notion that people have a right to not have the value of their wages stripped by deliberate, human intervention in the first place - with a rationalization for wage theft of "some of the things you would buy with your wages lose value over time anyway"?
Forgive me for having a hard time taking you seriously - you're starting to sound a bit like Tucker Carlson. Have you ever actually been part of the working class?
And I never denied that. All I'm saying is that in isolation inflation shrinks the gap between the two. It seems like you're trying to challenge it with emotions.
> Maybe that means the working class person can't keep the lights on, maybe they eat 400 calories a day to ensure their children have adequate nutrition.
Another emotional take. But I encourage you to speak to a working class immigrant. Working class struggles in US are nothing compared to the rest of the world. It's quite funny seeing how top 1% keeps complaining about top 0.01%.
> Plus, flatly rejecting the notion that people have a right to not have the value of their wages stripped by deliberate, human intervention in the first place - with a rationalization for wage theft of "some of the things you would buy with your wages lose value over time anyway"?
I'm still waiting for an explanation why result of labor not losing it's value over time is a human right. You gave several emotional takes and went into ad-hom territory, yet said nothing on the matter.
> Have you ever actually been part of the working class?
I did engage in manual labor for a brief period of time. Though I fail to see how that's relevant. Have you been a billionaire?
Obvious examples like unabashed white supremacists aside... what happens in less clear cases, like when a Palestinian rights organization starts posting BDS stuff, and Israelis respond by calling them a terror group?
One more justification for uncensorable, provably non-inflationary digital currencies.