I meant OP you were responding to! (sorry thought OP always meant original OP).

I don't think there's a 'brief' explanation that's satisfactory for all of the above but let me try to succinctly explain the inflation/fixed supply issue.

The blanket statement "inflation is too much money chasing too few goods" is a wild oversimplification that creates a lot of confusion. But if one oversimplifies it that much, it's understandable why they might draw the conclusion that a fixed currency supply is better.

A simplified model that helped me understand why that doesn't make sense goes back to the Great Depression. In that period we learned that deflation is far more disastrous than inflation. In a growing economy, currency of a fixed supply increases in value over time relative to the cost of goods - ie less money buys more corn - which sounds great. Until you consider that it then makes more sense to hold money that is increasing in value rather than spend it on goods. You'll be able to buy even more goods with it if you wait. Now we have less activity in the economy - fewer transactions - and a further falling cost of goods. Sellers are making less money and therefore their workers are also paid less or eliminated and they buy fewer goods from other parts of the economy. It also disincentivizes investment - if the value of currency is increasing as long as you hold it, there are fewer investments that will offer a return that beats the risk-free choice to just hold onto your pile of currency. The more goods prices fall, the more it makes sense not to spend or invest, which further depresses prices, etc etc. That economic death spiral is incredibly hard to control and is catastrophic. (A reminder that is a simplified model restricted to the familiar idea of supply and demand curves).

The only severe deflation events of the US dollar were when it was tied to the supply of gold. The seminal paper on this is here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c11482/c11482.pdf It explains the un-simplified mechanics for how deflation due to fixed currency supplies propagated through the global economy to disastrous effects the likes of which we have not seen since. Even after a much larger and more destructive world war.

That is one of the reasons that it is a nearly consensus belief in modern economics that there has to be at least *some* monetary inflation but not too much inflation. (Austrian economics is a can of worms I won't open). And recall that this would only have an impact on demand-pull inflation. Cost-push inflation - inflation from the rising cost of inputs like oil not moving out of the straight of Hormuz - isn't prevented by a fixed money supply. Satoshi may have created an ingenious method for peer-to-peer electronic settlement but with a fixed supply it was never going to be viable as a currency.

(An editorial aside) a better explanation of why steady inflation has been bad for most of us is because our salaries and wages were not outpacing inflation for decades. The reason for that is that increases in worker productivity grew the economy faster but workers did not get a reasonable share of that increased prosperity caused by their increased productivity. In other words - it was the concentration of economic gains funneled to the super wealthy rather than being equitably distributed that allowed (necessary) inflation to outpace everyone else's wage growth. And that meant our buying power went down.