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Comment by Hermel | Hacker News Reader

When articles get basic, easily verifiable facts wrong, I immediately start to doubt the quality of the whole article. Here it says:

> " By comparison, there are just under 50 billion Swiss Francs in circulation today, which are worth around $56bn USD."

There are about 90 billion Swiss Francs in circularion in cash alone. If you add to that all the Swiss Francs in accounts with the Swiss National Bank, we are at 722 billion, which is in the same ballpark as the Bitcoin market cap with about 800 billion Swiss Francs.

Source: https://data.snb.ch/de/topics/snb#!/chart/snbmobalech

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You know what's a little ironic, is that the questions and uncertainty in this thread about how many Swiss Francs actually exist are trivial to answer with Bitcoin.

FWIW, it is surprisingly(?), not so trivial with many other cryptocurrencies.

Touché.

Relatively straightforward with bitcoin, but not entirely trivial, since there can never be more than 20,999,971.02187096 bitcoins.

The simplest possible emission is 1 per second forever.

Um no, he isn't wrong. Yes he could word it better but circulating currency is correct. Source - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_franc#Circulation I think you have a misunderstanding about circulation.

"As of March 2010, the total value of released Swiss coins and banknotes was 49.6640 billion Swiss francs" Last I checked coins and banknotes don't exclusively make up the money supply.

EDIT: Crux of the issue here is that circulation is the wrong metric to use (money supply would be far more accurate).

Again. Circulation. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_in_circulation I believe article is focusing on using Bitcoin as currency and how it consumes more energy than driving a Tesla 2500 miles per transaction. Offsetting sustainability gains against climate change. Source-> https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

Indeed. The author is pointing out how Bitcoin was introduced by Satoshi as a decentralized cryptocurrency that would have lower transaction fees (enabling small transactions) and not having to depend on large intermediaries, but here we are and almost no one in the Bitcoin community considers it a good currency, transaction fees are much higher than the main alternatives (ACH or Visa—with the exception of international wire transfers which charge similar fees), and centralized online wallets and exchanges like Coinbase are where most of Bitcoin action actually happens now.

Satoshi’s paper is really good. More people should revisit it, and it’s even more interesting with hindsight today.

You are the one who is incorrect here. The incorrect figure you linked to is a ciculation metric for the forex market, not the amount of CHF in circulation.

As the parent comment correctly noted, CHF M0 Base money (ie: the amount of monetary base in circulation) is aproximately 722B : https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/money-supply-m0

We can certainly discuss definitions (as I understand it, GP's number is the number of bank notes in circulation plus the amount of money in checking accounts in the blue line, and bank notes alone in the red line). But Wikipedia lists the number from 2010, which is completely outdated. Counting only bank notes it's 88 bn CHF today.

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