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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> Monero in the same time frame technically only experienced just over 1% inflation but from June to July this year is experiencing 12% inflation and then had nearly 19% deflation a few months back

That doesn't sound right; annual inflation in the Monero blockchain is order of magnitude 200k new coins / 18,000k coins total ~= 1% annual and dropping. it isn't really feasible to get 12% inflation over a month with fundamentals like that. So while it is volatile, the changes in price aren't being caused by inflation. It is just supply-demand fluctuations in a relatively niche asset. Inflation is the trend in value change caused by longer term changes in supply.

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I think there is conflating that inflation can only be new money printing. The value of monero compared to a basket of goods from June to July changed by 12%. You can buy 12% fewer things today than in June. That is the same way the USD inflation is calculated. Yes supply of the dollar has an impact but if I were to buy groceries in monero today I would need 1.12x more units.

A) If you're going to make a point of defining inflation as something other than inflating of the money supply, why should people care? The only reason anyone pays attention to it is because of the long term downward trends - which are pretty much 100% due to monetary creation. Otherwise why, in practice, would the value of a currency drop? And why would this sort of "inflation" in Monero be an issue?

B) The [whatever]:XMR exchange rate is quite volatile, but that is measuring real fluctuations in the value of Monero depending on what is happening in the market today. Real value fluctuations are, by definition, not called inflation.

It is like saying the price of bananas experienced 12% inflation when there is a hurricane and a banana shortage. That isn't the right term - that sort of volatility isn't inflation.

I’m not trying to be disingenuous, we simply have different opinions about the definition of inflation. Honestly I have not heard that inflation is just the increase in money supply before. With us having different definitions we are clearly talking at cross purposes here.

Inflation is a long term measurement, short term events like a hurricane causing supply shocks can all add up to impact the rate of inflation over time but individually it doesn’t. It is fair to not count month to month fluctuations so I will give you that.

This is probably where most pro/anti crypto people break down in communication is us not using words the same way. You taught me a new definition of inflation today, I don’t think that’s right, but since we were using words differently that explains our disagreement.

This is a disingenuous comparison because the US dollar and most fiat currencies never increase in value medium to long term / "deflate" by design. The decreases in the value of the dollar are never offset, so if a basket of goods goes up 5% we bake that in forever.

In the UK I can't really think of a time when inflation has stopped or reversed for even a few months.

By contrast Monero goes both up and down. So sure, it's unstable, but it doesn't have "higher inflation", it's just more volatile.

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