First off, excellent post. Thank you!
There are some great videos on Khan Academy that helped me understand money supply. They are in the section: Finance and Capital Markets -> Money, banking and central banks. Here's the URL:
http://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-bankingSecondly, one other way money-supply deflation can occur with bitcoin (and all digital currency) is due to rounding errors in the bitcoin system.
Meaning, miners are paid BTC based on their hash rates (computational power of their mining computer). Let's say a miner mines for 12 months, accumulating 100 bitcoin. The bitcoin reward is paid out in many small transactions. Let's say our miner was paid his/her 100 bitcoin in 1,000 separate transactions. Some of the miner's rewards will be larger (e.g. 0.25 BTC). Other reward payments will be much smaller (e.g. .00187 BTC).
Later when the miner want to buy something for let's say 97.95 BTC, the computers have to figure out how much of each reward payment to add up to make the required 97.95 BTC. Because some of the reward payments need to be divided into smaller parts to make up the exact amount of 97.95 BTC, over time it leads to very small remainders in some of the reward payments.
And those small remainders can be unusable, because for each reward payment that's to be included in a transaction it takes computational power to validate the transaction. A single transaction of 97.95 BTC might be comprised of 900 smaller transactions. And theirs a cost, in the form of a payment fee, for such small transactions.
That's part of the bitcoin architecture. It's one way miner's get paid. So if the required payment fee is greater than the value of the remaining bitcoin in a single transaction, it's not cost effective to use the transaction. And thus, it can just sit there forever.
Over a long enough time those tiny little unusable transactions lead to money-supply deflation. The money isn't gone, exactly. It's just not economically viable to use it. In other words, because it costs more to spend the remaining BTC than its worth, the result is a system that's deflationary over time.
The good news is, the rest of your bitcoin will be worth more!!