This is a really complex topic that I don't really understand, but I think there's quite a lot of interesting nuance to the deflationary cryptocurrency question

This is a really complex topic that I don't really understand, but I think there's quite a lot of interesting nuance to the deflationary cryptocurrency question. For example, you could consider Bitcoin as being like a "specie" or "hard currency" within an ecosystem that also includes various types of "scrip" or "credits". Ether behaves a lot like that. It's the hard base currency in an ecosystem of tokens ("soft currencies") all with different monetary policies. There are very interesting Ethereum tokens without fixed supply, for example the token that will be issued by Maker (the "dai") which is basically an asset-backed credit token with an autonomous monetary policy to stabilize the token's market value measured against the IMF's currency basket index (XDR). This seems to be a really natural pattern: you have a small number of deflationary hard currency (precious metals, basically) that act as global store of value, hedge against local volatility, and neutral means of settlement; and then you have a whole range of other credit instruments. Random thought: to people brought up with cryptocurrencies, we might be explaining gold as "well, it's like nature's bitcoin: scarce, hard to mine, and very expensive."