Yup, predictable inflation/deflation is going to be better than unpredictable inflation/deflation because people can plan for it. Bitcoin will have uncertainty about its future value. I don’t know whether this would be more or less than for USD.
As a side note: because money is an asset, expectations about its future value are very important for its present value so most of the time “predictable inflation/deflation” will mean “constant inflation/deflation”.
The following is just cause I misunderstood your post at first:
Another way: if central banks don’t pay interest on cash, then people will have inappropriate incentives about how much money they should hold. If you have strong inflation and pay 0 interest on cash then it has a large negative real return and you punish people for holding it even if that doesn’t reflect real costs. If you have strong deflation and pay 0 interest then cash has large positive real return and you reward people for holding it even if this doesn’t reflect actual benefits. The interest rate on cash should probably be lower than short term real interest rates since otherwise people will choose to hold cash rather than other short term securities leading to an explosion in the demand for cash (and if it were higher, the currency issuer would probably be losing money). The Fed recently (2008) started paying interest on reserves (which is cash banks hold at the Fed), but they set that interest rate in a stupid way (it should probably be negative right now).
Yup, predictable inflation/deflation is going to be better than unpredictable inflation/deflation because people can plan for it. Bitcoin will have uncertainty about its future value. I don’t know whether this would be more or less than for USD.
As a side note: because money is an asset, expectations about its future value are very important for its present value so most of the time “predictable inflation/deflation” will mean “constant inflation/deflation”.
The following is just cause I misunderstood your post at first:
Predictable inflation/deflation can have real effects if it’s expensive for plan for it. For example if it’s not very practical to index things to inflation or costly to change prices (supermarket prices have frequent sales, but their reference prices only change about once a year).
Another way: if central banks don’t pay interest on cash, then people will have inappropriate incentives about how much money they should hold. If you have strong inflation and pay 0 interest on cash then it has a large negative real return and you punish people for holding it even if that doesn’t reflect real costs. If you have strong deflation and pay 0 interest then cash has large positive real return and you reward people for holding it even if this doesn’t reflect actual benefits. The interest rate on cash should probably be lower than short term real interest rates since otherwise people will choose to hold cash rather than other short term securities leading to an explosion in the demand for cash (and if it were higher, the currency issuer would probably be losing money). The Fed recently (2008) started paying interest on reserves (which is cash banks hold at the Fed), but they set that interest rate in a stupid way (it should probably be negative right now).