Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordfnordfnord | Hacker News Reader

>but it'll never be as stable as the dollar is today.

That's right, and it's a feature, not a bug.

Well said. I've had enough of this inflation. The poorer you are, the less likely you have money in any investment that is yields better results that inflation. The richer you are, the more likely you have your money both diversified and invested with good ROI.

The poorer you are, the less likely you are to have wealth to protect from inflation. If wages would keep pace with inflation, there would be no problem at all. To my mind, there is a wage problem for the poor, not an inflation problem.

Those that do have wealth to protect should be encouraged to use it for productive investments. Mild inflation is one way to do that, and it is healthy. Massive inflation to fund overseas adventurism on the other hand, is not healthy.

As the author of this piece correctly points out, deflation leads to hording behavior. In a world where everyone used bitcoin, the wealth disparity would only grow faster.

Inflation helps for capital and labor. It forces capital to be involved, and it lets labor be devalued. Wages are extremely sticky, but only nominally.

Wage increases always lag inflation. In a market a with huge labor surplus, wages may lag longer than many can tolerate.

Elasticity of supply and inflation rate are two completely orthogonal concepts. A deflationary currency can still have elastic supply, and an inflationary currency can still have inelastic supply.

Elasticity simply refers to whether the supply can react to price. In bitcoin's case, it cannot, since the supply is determined by an algorithm.

That's really not a feature for anyone.

Then hold Dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com