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Comment by afpx | Hacker News Reader

The deflationary aspect is the number one reason I’ve never bought into a crypto currency. I have serious ethical and moral issues that prevent me.

In addition to hoarding, deflationary currencies (like gold) cause people to spend lots of money and effort trying to get other people to buy into them too. For me, it’s a very sad thing to watch unfold. It’s like when the ‘buy gold’ commercials started appearing on Fox News, and I saw my grandparents buying gold.

If someone has to spend lots of time and money advertising how useful something is, it’s probably more useful to them than me.

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I don't understand why that's an ethical dilemma. Do you not have a problem with disproportionately increasing the cost of living for the poor[0] or forcing the mddle class to subsidize big corporations [1] or creating an economy where corporate survival is tied to consumption, leading to innovations in "disposable product strategies"?

[0] let's say you're spending 90% of your income on cost of living and there's 10% inflation. That's way worse than in you're spending 20% of your income on necessaries and there's 10% inflation.

[1] in order to preserve wealth in an inflationary regime, the middle class is encouraged to put money into the stock market, which basically becomes a mechanism to socialize the costs of corporate r&d while the Lions share of the gains go elsewhere (the scraps are thrown back at the middle class, enough to keep them from seeing the inherent problem with the system)

What you did is point out a few real problems in our current economic reality of which inflation is one part. In no way does this say anything about how deflation solves any of them, or even leads to worse scenarios.. Think about the issues you mentioned - wage stagnation, unsustainable expectation of growth in corporate profits, systemic inequality etc. - Now ask yourself "how will removing monetary inflation and replacing it with monetary deflation affect these systemic issues, in which direction will it drive them, how and why?" If you still come out on the pro-deflation side, I'd be happy to hear your perspective.

real wage stagnation is a social policy, not an emergent phenomenon. Politicians are concerned about unemployment numbers, and there is this bogeyman that "sticky wages" of lower classes gets in the way. The prescribed way around this is to decrease the real value of money and incrementally dislodge the liability of employing lower classes.

Systemic inequality is generated, by deliberate inflationary policy[0], it is not a "universal constant of the universe".

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

"Even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

[0] I do, for what it's worth, think that liberal economists aren't acting in bad faith, they're just clueless, mostly because if you're a liberal economist (or almost any economist, really) you've probably never been poor.

You appear to be making some big leaps and also assuming several things about my beliefs and politics. I try not to do political discussions ($$).

But, if you're seriously and genuinely interested in my perspectives, let's talk more. I've been thinking of economics, currencies, labor, income, and wealth for probably 25 years. It's a huge hobby of mine. I've been enthusiastically monitoring crypto-currencies ever since Bitcoin emerged and have been thinking about them for even longer. I could probably write 100s of pages on my thoughts. But, HN is definitely not the place to start that type of in-depth discussion.

($$) Political debates (especially online) are rarely productive. A person's political views are built on so many low-level things that it's a very personal thing. I used to love political debates when I was younger - it just felt so good. But, I've learned that people's politics don't budge much. So, while interesting, it's ultimately not useful.

The two issues are separate. Isn't there a lot of sound finical advise telling people to put money into the stock market? But isn't the stock market widely a greater fool game these days? Companies don't pay dividends anymore, voting rights are being reduced, and many companies are far too large to send a chance at being acquired.

It would be a terrible deal if 90% of the population wasn't accumulating stock via a 401K