Domino Valdano People can and do spend Bitcoin. Bitcoin was used as...
· Comment — Archer T. Ships replied to Gordon Hanzmann-Johnson's comment. · View on Facebook · Markdown source
Domino Valdano People can and do spend Bitcoin. Bitcoin was used as currency for years on the DNM's, for example. It's not rational to hold Bitcoin forever, since what you want are the goods and services you can buy with Bitcoin. What good does it do you to have a thousand bitcoin in your wallet when you die? And if you don't spend it while you're alive, your heirs will. Deflation is what _should_ happen as technological advances improve the efficiency of producing goods and services. If the supply of dollars were fixed, each dollar would represent more goods and services, ie it would increase in value. Inflation is a form of taxation. Roman emperors financed their warmongering by debasing their currency (substituting cheaper metals for gold and silver in their coinage). That initially increased the amount that they could spend, at the cost of reducing the value of each individual coin. The same thing happens when the government "prints" trillions of new dollars. At first, the government can spend the dollars as if they had the same value as before. But there's been no real increase in true wealth (more efficiently produced goods and services). Therefore, each dollar represents a smaller claim on the same number of goods and services, ie everyone who holds dollars has lost some of their wealth to the government. Although there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin (and many of those have been lost), you can always increase the number of units of Bitcoin by increasing the number of decimal places. Right now, the smallest unit is the Satoshi (1x10^8 or 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin), but there's no reason it couldn't be increased to 1x10^12 or beyond.