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Comment by H99189 | Hacker News Reader

Far too simple of an analogy. First there is competition between miners so there's never going to be a single source, plus there are millions mined already in the pool. Also, bitcoins are currently divisible to 8 decimal places but that can be changed as soon as it's needed.

It's quite possible in 20 years that 0.000000000001 of a bitcoin will make the average house payment and by then, we'll have friendly names for all the decimal places.

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This entire thing is based around the premise that BTC is freely exchangeable for real currency. The amount currently exchanged is microscopic compared to the market value of BTC.

Here's old school BTC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money

> It's quite possible in 20 years that 0.000000000001 of a bitcoin will make the average house payment

No, it isn't.

Thats a bold claim given the history.

No, it isn't.. and I sincerely hope you're joking.

You should do the math on that and figure out what the value of a single bitcoin would have to be to make it come true. If that doesn't wake you up to how ridiculous that claim is, I don't know what to tell you.

I'll even go incredibly easy on you and let you assume the average mortgage payment is only $100.

Hint: it's a number larger than the US GDP

It's somewhat terrifying to me that I even have to argue this with someone.

OK, I didn't do the math. Thanks for the correction :). Turns out - lets ignore your generosity there, that we are realistically talking around 1000 trillion. National debt is at like 14 trillion. Chinese M1 money stock is 7 trillion. Now at the current growth rate, which is unreasonable to continually sustain, could continue to be high for a while, and you can't ignore the incredible growth of the global narrow money stock - https://data.oecd.org/money/narrow-money-m1.htm#indicator-ch... (10x in 15 years - 62x for Turkey in 20 years!). So I'll agree with you, highly, highly unlikely - but not at all beyond the realms of possibility - given what appears to be highly improbable (yet predictable history).

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