You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

jimrandomh comments on General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011) - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: SilasBarta 10 June 2011 11:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (102)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 June 2011 03:23:04PM 6 points [-]

Inflation only really affects dollar-denominated accounts that don't bear (enough) interest. Everyone needs to have some money in such accounts (checking accounts, cash) for short-term spending purposes. For poor people, this is usually the majority of their holdings; for wealthy people, it will only be a tiny fraction. Thus, inflation has a larger impact, percentage-wise, on the poor. Inflation also produces downward pressure on effective wages, since workers have to keep getting raises just to maintain parity.

I think that inflation is dramatically higher than is commonly realized; increased production efficiency should be causing the prices of most things to plummet, but other than electronics, that isn't happening.