Sure there is a balance. Just like in emerging markets with high interest rates: if your government pays 10% per year (real terms) interest on its bonds, would

Sure there is a balance. Just like in emerging markets with high interest rates: if your government pays 10% per year (real terms) interest on its bonds, would you invest in a business that would only return 9%? No, nobody would ever invest in it. But there's a reason the government is paying 10%: to reward the risk of lending money to it. In the case of bitcoin, the only reason there is this deflationary "tax" is because someone arbitrarily decided that the supply of bitcoins should remain constant. So you're voluntarily fucking up your economy. Sure, "we could relax that and make the supply increase over time", but that doesn't address fluctuations on the demand for money, resulting in harder oscillations. And then "but then we could have the supply adjust dynamically based on some guidance from economists plus the balance of supply and demand for money". Well, congrats, you just recreated the modern monetary system.