I've never understood this argument. There's no person or market for which BTC is their only currency. It doesn't matter if BTC is inflationary or deflationary, because there's never going to be a time when a nation (or corporation, or really really rich person) is holding a non-negligible amount of its wealth in BTC. Most of their money will be denominated in their local currency, and through that, they will be affected by inflation, and driven to invest.
The effect of people holding BTC on a given economy's inflationary tendency would, I'd think, be about the same as the effect that people holding EFT funds or gold or permanent stamps has on inflationary tendency—which is to say, negligible.
To rebut this, you could measure the inflationary tendency of a made-up virtual market like that of the "deep web"... but we measure inflation to know about things like affordability and livability and nGDP—things that affect the places people live in, and through those, affect people's lives. People don't move their money into investments because Internet marijuanas are inflating in price; they move money to investments because core CPI is going up, and so it's costing more to buy bread and to pay their utility bills. And, unless a nation adopts BTC as its national currency, BTC's fixed monetary policy will never correlate with any core CPI anywhere.
Why would I want to spend a limited edition BTC™ if I know the system that produces bitcoins is going to stop producing the coins? Adding the assumption that as the 'bitcoin economy' grows, so too will demand for bitcoins thus further increasing demand on the limited supply of bitcoins. So all signs point to never spend your bitcoins unless you want to 'bet' against the bitcoin ecosystem by spending your BTC tokens.
I suppose you think communism can happen in 1 step too, hmm maybe read some Trotsky? The market cap and volume needs to be high for stability as a medium of transfer of wealth. That gives bitcoin the largest use case. Internet stamps is just a ridiculous analogy. Mail prices are artificially low due to government subsidies.
I see what you mean, but it works both ways: if the world can evolve toward using BTC as a universal currency, then BTC can, in parallel, evolve toward being usable as a universal currency. The two would meet in the middle.
You're imagining a gradual adoption of BTC for everything everywhere, while BTC itself remains constant, which would never happen. Any nation that wanted to adopt BTC for its sole currency would have enough force to change BTC to make it no longer deflationary. Or, more simply, just create "BTC but not deflationary" and start using it—it'd immediately become the primary cryptocurrency from the sheer number of users it would gain in that country (even if the country is tiny!) and then any other country that wanted to participate would adopt that currency, not deflationary-BTC.
The effect of people holding BTC on a given economy's inflationary tendency would, I'd think, be about the same as the effect that people holding EFT funds or gold or permanent stamps has on inflationary tendency—which is to say, negligible.
To rebut this, you could measure the inflationary tendency of a made-up virtual market like that of the "deep web"... but we measure inflation to know about things like affordability and livability and nGDP—things that affect the places people live in, and through those, affect people's lives. People don't move their money into investments because Internet marijuanas are inflating in price; they move money to investments because core CPI is going up, and so it's costing more to buy bread and to pay their utility bills. And, unless a nation adopts BTC as its national currency, BTC's fixed monetary policy will never correlate with any core CPI anywhere.