I was going to comment under @k00b's Will AI Cause Massive Deflation?, but it veered off that topic and turned into a post.
So...
Central banks' Monopoly money is not a monopoly on money.
But does what they do even matter to those saving in sats, or are we not entirely isolated from fiat?
The more they print, the more people move to Bitcoin, which makes our sats more valuable. A win for us, a win for them and a loss for fiat hoarders.
But let's consider someone who doesn't have a large sat stack; maybe they've just been orange pilled and they're only just starting.
With enough printing to steal the benefits of productivity growth, central banks can make fiat wages go down in real terms to meet their 2% inflation target. Fiat wages go down for two reasons I can think of:
- Anchoring bias. This is a bit muddy and I don't consider it a serious problem. You can blame your employer's lack of understanding inflation and in a healthy, competitive job market, change jobs to reset it.
- Cantillon effect.
While 1. makes your wages rise slower than productivity (by pegging them to CPI inflation, if even that), 2. slows down productivity growth by stealing from the productive economy.
As a result 2. the productivity growth may be 5% instead of 10%, and as a result of 1. you may only get a 2% nominal pay rise.
Since most of the economy is still on a fiat standard, even if you're a bitcoiner, your earnings (through employment or business activity) still suffer from fiat. But they suffer in a NAP-non-violating way, as a negative externality. It's a case of "I, as a bitcoiner, am earning so little, because most people suck by not being bitcoiners. But they have the right to suck, I can't stop them."
However, the more of the economy moves to a Bitcoin standard (think MicroStrategy), the less the Cantillon effect will be able to extract from it, and productivity will rise faster.
The good thing, however, is how much you can discount the future by moving onto a Bitcoin standard. Your earnings, ravaged by fiat, may be low in today's value (like "why the heck can't I buy a private jet for 8 hours of work? Is it that much to ask in 2024?"), but they're worth heaps in future value ("if I work 8 hours today and save my wages, I need to wait freaking 10 or even more years before they buy me a jet"). Which maybe negates the negative externality of fiat. Even if you adopt a Bitcoin standard late, while you may not be able to buy cheap sats, adopting it late means adopting it when much of the economy is on a Bitcoin standard already and therefore it's much more productive (thanks to AI etc. and little Cantillon effect to steal from it) and everyone's wages reflect that. You may only earn 1 sat a day, but that 1 sat may well buy you a jet.
So in either case (early adoption or late adoption) you should benefit from the exponentially growing productivity coupled with Bitcoin. But of course adopting Bitcoin early is better than adopting it late.
All this assuming it "catches on" of course.