You're 99% there: there is no reason to want inflation or deflation. But the final wrinkle is that if your wealth is sitting around as money, it's not "doing" a

You're 99% there: there is no reason to want inflation or deflation. But the final wrinkle is that if your wealth is sitting around as money, it's not "doing" anything. One concept I've had in the past is a currency system where you never hold the medium of exchange for any length of time. Instead, you have something like an ultra-diversified investment portfolio that covers a massive swath of securities, commodities, etc. that you can buy microshares of. You could picture an electronic transaction system where prices are denominated in dollars, and whenever you want to buy something, you briefly trade away your shares for dollars and pass them to the seller, who immediately resolves those dollars back into shares. In other words, your store of value is electronically handled by owning shares of things that have literal value, and you never have to worry about how much the medium of exchange is "worth". Creation or destruction of dollars is not really a concern for the users of such a system. Obviously, though, there are some holes in this system in terms of implementation, otherwise I'd probably be off working on it!