I think the point here is that nobody knows. That may sound like a dismissive and superficial stance to take... but it happens to be the most honest out there.

I think the point here is that nobody knows. That may sound like a dismissive and superficial stance to take... but it happens to be the most honest out there. There is a key aspect of knowing something in terms of a rigorous scientific understanding that is forgotten so often in conversations about it that it just drives me insane. In any experiment with a control, all your other variables have to be fixed... ... or you don't know shit. Now apply this to the bitcoin debate. Let's take it for granted that deflation in a debt, fiat, gold based currency system is a bad... bad thing. We're going to grant it for the sake of argument. Well - you still don't know crapola about whether or not deflation in a bitcoin based currency system is bad. For there are key differences in each case. Once you move from any of these to bitcoin, certain variables flip. In a debt based currency system, deflation amounts to the actual destruction of available cash in the system. That's the chief reason why deflation is so bad for our economies. If you get to the point where we're at now where the system can't soak up any more debt, then your deflation becomes a real problem since you no longer have any means to create the inflation you need to stimulate growth. But deflation in bitcoin does NOT entail cash destruction. For that is fixed by the algo. So here is a key difference. And it's just one of many I could mention for this case. In a fiat based currency system - where a government prints the money (as opposed to having a central bank buy government debt) - any deflation can be offset easily because printing more money is not limited to debt saturation. Bitcoin is just not comparable to this kind of system for this reason. We need to compare it to systems where deflation is a real possibility. Maybe it's closest to a gold backed system? Maybe. But there are flipped variables here too. Gold is not infinitely divisible. It can't be exchanged with any degree of ease like bitcoin can... etc... Now of course, a little bit of a priori speculation is all well and good, and a necessary part of hypothesis formulation. But for heaven's sake stop getting into these discussions under the pretext of actually knowing anything. The article is essentially right. We don't know. Run the experiment... wait and see. Oh but of course, we have governments that will shut it down before the experiment has had a chance to yield results...