Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.

This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:

* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral

* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...

* https://crypto.bi/deflationary/

† I am aware of satoshis.

Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.

> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.

And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?

How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.

And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).

Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.

Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.

Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.

This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.

It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.