This thread is precious in the light of all the screaming "deflationary currency prevents spending and will kill the economy!!!".
This, this, this!
It's an interesting psychological situation. Because things become cheaper and cheaper as you go along, you think, "Wow, this car would have cost me 9000 BTC last year, but now I can buy it for only 1500 BTC, that's a steal!" Nevermind that you'd be able to buy it for 375 BTC the next year.
This is debatable...
I would argue "hold it until there's no other possibility" is good for a currency -- well, actually good for the people using the currency, the currency itself doesn't really matter.
Why? Because spending money just because it constantly loses it's value will make people buy stuff they don't really need and will make the people (economy) as a whole waste more energy than necessary and produce stuff that isn't really needed.
Let's assume for a moment we had a functioning loan/investment market (one could argue we have, but I don't think it's developed enough) in bitcoin... "hoarding" would then become "saving" in the sense that the capital will not merely sit in peoples paper wallets, but be used to fund innovation, make production more efficient, etc. pp.
Recall the whole "time perference" theory from austrian economics... it makes sense: You don't need/want the product
now so you "save" your money by putting it into a savings account at a reputable savings & loan business. This sends a "signal" (a price signal in effect) to the economy saying: "We don't need as much product/service now, better invest in new factory / innovation / higher efficiency / providing other products and services we might actually need instead". Capital available for development just got a little cheaper. Market for goods/services experiences lowered demand, ergo prices fall. This is a feedback system that effects the economy (producers) actually delivers what is needed. The consumer sends a signal (via lowered demand for goods and higher supply of investment capital (taken that savings/loan business is functional and the consumer will "invest" instead of "hoard")) and the economy listens.
Now, with a "managed money supply", these valuable signals are being distorted. Money is injected into the economy (via central bank + credit expansion by the commercial banks) because politicians or whoever think the economy must keep growing (at least "on paper")... the economy becomes blind to the real needs and likely overheats and overproduces, advertises aggressively to sell the unneeded product, unecessarily burns precious natural resources and human labour, decreasing happyness overall (side-note: populations happyness should be what politicians are being measured by, not GDP).
Let's think about the current situation: there are currency wars going on: not only are the fiat currencies themselves in a "race to the bottom" trying to out-stimulate the economies of other nationstates (fiat currencies are usually linked to nationstates), but also there is a new player in the field. A new kind of "good money" (wikipedia: '"Good" money is money that shows little difference between its nominal value (the face value of the coin) and its commodity value'), bitcoin... driving out the "bad" fiat money (everybody spends fiat and hoards bitcoin). Why is bitcoin the "new kind of good money"? Because it's a) good money and b) possesses -- in contrast to the other good moneys like gold -- the impertinant property to be actually transactable and therefore usable as a medium of exchange within the economy.
So what's happening is this: people spend depreciating fiat currencies and hoard good money like silver and bitcoin. Lacking a trustable savings & loan market, these bitcoins sit in personal wallets, not being invested into the economy. Building a trustable functioning savings & loan market (or depository market) is hard for the "good money", because there's plenty of bad money to be had at 0% and noone is willing to invest precious good money at 0%. So naturally we are observing the expected effect: bitcoins are being hoarded and it's price relative to fiat goes up, up, up (which will continue imo for a good long jolly time, by the way)
On a side-note: I love how the weak hands become more fearful with every $1-rise in bitcoin price and distribute their coins to the masses (still early adopters, really)
;tldr: fuck managed money, we want sound money, and: saving is good for the people. Also: bitcoin (or a variant) will become the #1 global money.
