Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification. Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.

Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.

For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.

The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise.

Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.

I like the alternative even less, as it incentivises spending more than you would and taking on debt you don't really need.

I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.

The other option is to make everyone gamblers, either speculate on properties or stocks. Pick your poison.

During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.

(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)

There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.

At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?

At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.

It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones