Nasty Dynasty.
You know who the biggest hypocrites in the world are theses days?
Bitcoin maximalists.
These people pretend to care about decentralization when they really just want to build up a pile of wealth so big it would put ancient China to shame. Imagine the nerve of these people. Claiming they want a better world and spout off all this nonsense of decentralizing power, as they try to consolidate as much power for themselves as they possibility can. Silly humans: can't even follow your own rules.
Deflation is bad.
It is known. There's a reason gold and silver are constantly underperforming, and derivatives manipulations is only a small part of it. Money is an abstract concept, therefore money taking physical form is automatically a bad idea from the get-go.
Money velocity.
Bitcoin is a unicorn asset that's been doubling in value for the past 8 years (even more in the early years). Defi applications are the latest craze, and it's becoming obvious that there is very little reason for users to sell their Bitcoin going forward.
Why would you sell your Bitcoin when you can throw it into a yield farm and fund a retirement account for the rest of your life? Why would you sell your Bitcoin when you can lock it up as collateral and draw loans from it? Yeah, you wouldn't. Therefore, in combination with outrageous transfer fees, it becomes obvious that the velocity of Bitcoin is going to grind to a halt as time goes on and the positions of strong hands get more solidified.
Again, this is bad for everyone. It creates a stagnant economy where everyone is hoarding and no one is spending. The Bitcoin economy is going to constantly be in "survival mode" where everyone is afraid to spend the token. Not great.
In my opinion, Bitcoin is still a fantastic buy as long as you can afford the transaction fees. These fees are still relatively quite low (especially from self-hosted wallets aka not-exchanges). It's when Bitcoin's fees get up to $100+ on the low side that the party ends for the little guys and the only way to interact with Bitcoin profitably will either to be filthy rich or by trusting an intermediary to maintain custody of funds and route transactions together for a cheaper overall price.
Sure, it's possible that the blocksize starts increasing, lowering the fees, but who does that benefit? It certainly isn't in the best interests of the miners. Miners want to make more money and higher fees provide that. It's not good for the node-runners because it will make nodes more expensive. It's not good for the lightning network because it makes them less relevant.
The only group that benefits from a bigger Bitcoin blocksize are the users of Bitcoin who are transferring it around. Funny story: the users of Bitcoin have no say in the governance in Bitcoin. OOPS. Too bad so sad, try again.
The people who run the Bitcoin network are the devs, the node-runners, and the miners. Nowhere in that equation are the actual users who hold and transfer around Bitcoin. This is why DPOS is in many ways an absolutely superior governance structure that the world has been largely ignoring.
DPOS
With DPOS, your stake is your vote. Many will claim that in theory this leads to corruption. Yes, well, that's nice, in theory. In reality the exact opposite thing is happening. This can be verified provably on-chain over time.
What happens when the rich and powerful are in charge and they exploit the economy? They make money off of those exploits. The thing about DPOS is that it's a self-correcting system. The users here that take gains and are selling off Hive? Yeah, they are losing power. And who's gaining that power? The users buying who actually give a shit. In another four years this place is going to look a whole lot different, that's for damn sure.
"My vote doesn't matter!"
Yes, that's true in the legacy economy. One-person one-vote enforced by KYC is obviously a failed system. Many on Hive tend to lean towards this idea that small votes don't matter here either. That is false.
The minnow example.
A minnow on Hive has around 500 coins. With 141.4M Hive tokens powered up, that's a weight of 0.00035%. Or, in other words, if 282,800 users had exactly that much stake it would equal 100% of the entire voting power on Hive. Let that sink in for a bit. A quarter million users is a nothing amount in terms of the borderless internet.
A stack worth less than $200 on Hive gets you a stronger vote than you could ever hope to get within legacy republics. Don't forget that republics have already been full on hacked a thousand times over, and that propaganda, lobbyists, and the money behind the curtain is what's driving this Goliath beast of a system.
It's even more crazy to think that my personal share in this network is one out of 637 at the moment. My stack is big enough that I've actually been personally asked multiple times to upvotes witnesses and proposals via DM. I started here with nothing and 3 years later I'm a fairly big players, and I haven't even built anything yet. Crazy stuff.
Inflation doesn't matter.
What matters is who controls that inflation in combination with liquidity factors. When inflation is centralized, it's easy for corruption to set in and for funny money to be printed and spent in every direction. Meanwhile, crypto is programmatic money that is impossible to counterfeit and very hard to double-spend. The future is here, the world just hasn't embraced it yet.
Conclusion
Inflation is great when it's allocated in a decentralized manner. This mechanic not only allows for users to escape the burdens of centralized inflation, but also on a more subtle level allows old-money to exit the system and new money to thrive. In combination with DPOS where stake is equivalent to voting power, we see some truly interesting network effects pop up.
Bitcoin will never die, but its complete lack of proper inflation incentives will push it lower and lower on the market cap when the time comes. As a deflationary asset, Bitcoin is not the most valuable asset in the space, it is simply the safest asset in the space. The anchor. It will always continue being the anchor, even to the point of weighing the rest of the market down when we are ready to fly.
Less inflation will only equate to a higher token price if that inflation was allocated incorrectly. Correctly allocated inflation generates more liquidity than it drains. Bitcoin has no inflation, making it the safe play, but there are thousands of other networks out here tinkering around with models that higher cap coins could never dream of risking. There will obviously be a spectrum of winners and losers that consistently outperform/underperform the networks that take fewer risks. This is decentralization at it's finest. Calling everything that isn't Bitcoin a "shitcoin"... isn't.