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Comment by herodoturtle | Hacker News Reader

I read this comment with interest, thanks for sharing. Makes good sense to me.

If I may ask, do you think the distribution of bitcoin will be somewhat equitable as we approach 2140?

And do you you think it will actually become a medium of exchange as originally hoped? Or will it remain a store of wealth only (as things currently seem to indicate)?

And if it indeed remains only a store of wealth, will said wealth be distributed relatively equally, or will we be left with a relatively small pool of large holders?

Just trying to wrap my mind around the long-term evolution of bitcoin - and your way of explaining the energy conundrum above makes me think you probably have good insight on this.

I'd value your opinion, thanks :)

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Again I can't really say much about what could happen at this point. History "behaves" too bizarrely, especially over such a long time period, and inflection points are usually completely random and unpredictable (black swans), being only obvious in retrospect.

One thing I can be fairly confident won't happen is that BTC will become a medium of exchange. This is because BTC mechanically behaves more like a commodity than a currency, which means that (for various, immutable technical reasons) it's not able to match the speed of settlement, the price stability and the reliability of supply that are required for a good medium of exchange.

Thanks Michael, appreciate your thoughts.

And I agree. I too doubt BTC will become the medium of exchange it was originally envisaged to be.

As to whether it will retain our confidence as a store of value remains to be seen.

I will continue to follow the heated discussion on HN with much interest. It's great to be able to read the consolidated thoughts of individuals who clearly understand this technology far better than I do.

It's impossible to predict the future. If everyone holds bitcoin as a store of value then the value should drop as it's not being used for anything one would think. I believe the best outcome is that people start using bitcoin for every day purchases and the hope is that by 2140 the price is relatively stable. Most likely there will be many large holders as there are with real money.

However, someone could maybe do a 51% attack on bitcoin at some point. Maybe there is a unforeseen flaw in bitcoin. Maybe something better comes a long. It's impossible to know.

Or maybe there's a foreseen flaw in bitcoin. It's based on public-key cryptography which can be broken by quantum computers. Those don't exist yet (at least not in any form relevant to cryptography in practise), but I think they will by 2140.

If they are physically realizable at all in practice, then they very likely will be by 2140.

But I think there's a non-negligible chance that the theory of quantum mechanics will break down as we move to superpositions of 2^1024 classical states that must be faithfully represented with physical elements.

People often bring up the Bitcoin algorithm to make arguments against it, but don't seem to acknowledge the fact that the protocol is mutable.

If the sha-256 algorithm was cracked such that BTC blocks could be solved instantly, the existing miners would have to choose between:

1. No more income, or

2. Adopt a quantum-resistant protocol.

Market economics being what they are, I think it's safe to assume that BTC would survive the "quantum apocalypse." There's too much money at stake for any other choice to be the logical outcome.

From my understand, and I'm no expect, but the only known quantum attack against symmetrical crypto like sha-2 is [Grover's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm), and the recommended advice is to double the key size, so sha-256 would probably see a huge boost in "hash rate" but not be broken, a move to sha-512 would work probably work.

The problem is that Shor's algorithm breaks asymmetrical crypto used in the wallet signing, that means you can forge ownership of any transaction outputs, which would completely shatter confidence in the coin before they could migrate all ownership of all funds to a new post-quantum signature scheme, this problem is a lot harder to solve compared to a hash algorithm upgrade.

" bitcoin for every day purchases and the hope is that by 2140 the price is relatively stable."

This is fantastically impossible.

It will about as stable as any other commodity plus the additional swings due to public stampedes one way or another, and the fact that there is no 'underlying value' to anchor the price (like Oil).

Feasibly, if exchange rates are razor thin (unlikely) then it might be possible buy milk and bread with BTC simply by doing the conversion on point, but that of course requires someone to do some 'investing math / intuition' every time they buy a stick of gum.

It can't be a functional currency, at least as it's designed.

And the notion that it consumes gigantic amounts of energy for no net value gained should have everyone up in arms.

> It can't be a functional currency, at least as it's designed.

Citation needed

> And the notion that it consumes gigantic amounts of energy for no net value gained should have everyone up in arms.

For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them.

When you start to add up all of the energy that would be saved if bitcoin succeeds, the energy costs associated with mining start looking quite a bit smaller.

"Citation needed"

I literally just explained it to you.

The price of BTC has always been highly unstable. There is absolutely no evidence it will ever be stable, to the contrary in fact, all evidence points to the fact that it will remain unstable.

Every single commodity or currency extant to an economy is unstable relative to the currency of that economy. The only thing 'stable' in terms of USD are things closely tied to the managed USD.

Just the mere fact that it's highly unstable - all other things notwithstanding - make it impossible to be a currency.

"For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them."

It's really bizarre that anyone would believe this.

Starting with the fact that 'digitization of currency' is already well under way and so there are no 'truck rolls' in the future.

But of course, the implication that banks only provide a 'place to store' money is completely false. Financial Services are an entire industry. Lending, transactions, authorizations, contracts, accounting, risk management, asset allocation, it's a gigantic industry.

But it's moot, BTC will be the same in 20 years that it is one, something to talk about.

"Financial Services are an entire industry. Lending, transactions, authorizations, contracts, accounting, risk management, asset allocation, it's a gigantic industry."

Right, this is all on ethereum

I dont know much about Ethereum but the mere existence of it threatens Bitcoin's "world domination" aspirations and who knows, maybe something will come out that will threaten Ethereum.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both legacy blockchains.

There are many contenders. XTZ and ADA are both technologically far beyond what BTC or ETH can ever be.

So Etherium will do credit checks? Evaluate the legitimacy and valuation of major assets? Validate small business plans? Check creditor references? Do due legal and IP due dilligence? Foreclose? Evaluate the credibility of executive teams? Evaluate contracts? Resolve commercial disputes? Do risk assessment of various kinds?

Etc, etc. etc?

The complete lack of understanding of anything financial postulated by the crypto crowd is really painful.

The notion of 'crypto' is actually interesting, and large swaths of the financial world would actually buy into it, but most of it makes no sense unfortunately.

Yeah, using the magic of DeFi I can easily get a loan for $100K with no bank approval and no wasteful bank employees checking my credit.

All I need is more than $100K worth of crypto assets I can tie up as collateral for my loan. So I'll be able to buy a car or a house, as long as I have more than enough money to do so already. Banks don't know about this one weird trick that makes them obsolete!

Can't reply directly to the sibling comment on DeFi, but that solves the issue raised above e.g.: I have 100k worth of BTC, I want to spend that on something but I expect the value of my BTC to rise, so I use it as collateral for a pegged coin (say USDC or DAI) and make a purchase.

I am protected from losses of spending my BTC. As with all finance yes I also carry the risk of BTC falling and liquidating my loan - but assuming I have not also lost my loan I am protected from a major fall, as my collateral will be taken and I still have my loaned coins.

>For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them.

Is this supposed to be some joke? No it doesn't. Someone had to create a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash just to increase the block size. You've had your chance and you blew it.

What's going to happen from now on is that Bitcoin will be absorbed by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal who build an actual payment layer on top of Bitcoin and then people will use Visa, Mastercard and Paypal as their bank. It's the Bitcoin you know and love that is going to die.

The wealth distribution of bitcoin is even worse than the wealth distribution of society as a whole. Further, I suspect that this would be the typical state for any finite/limited asset. IMO, things like bitcoin (and gold) as a primary wealth store are how you create stratified societies with entrenched elites and banking orgs with more money/power than nation states. Not that bitcoin could ever happen dominate, but it's certainly not egalitarian in any sense.

Can you give an example of an egalitarian currency or store of value?

One that has a fixed block subsidy. After any amount of time, whether years or decades or centuries, it will have been distributed evenly over all that time.

Rather than having 50% distributed in just the first 4 years, and only crumbs in later decades.

Gold is much more like the former.

I don't see how that logic follows, if this was a fixed block subsidy over the first 4 years instead of just 50%, surely the situation you are describing would be worse ?

There's a huge difference between fixed forever and fixed for only 4 years and then dropping to 0. Bitcoin is closer to the latter (instead of dropping to 0, it keeps halving every 4 years). Gold is closer to the former.

"Egalitarian currency" and "store of value" are somewhat mutually opposed goals.

A stable store of value is always going to socially/psychologically encourage hoarding and other human traits that lead exactly back to inequal distributions of value ("wealth").

A truly egalitarian currency would need to focus on the velocity and acceleration (the current of the currency) curves far more than the value at rest, which likely would be an afterthought.

I would expect it to get worse, over time, too. When the block reward was high, it meant that the (strictly financial) cost of actually operating the Bitcoin network was covered by Bitcoin dilution, which meant that everyone was paying it pro rata based on how much Bitcoin they actually own. As the block reward decreases, though, it increasingly has to be covered by transaction costs. That's going to progressively price people out of participation in the direct Bitcoin economy.

I can see using Bitcoin as a primary wealth store, similar to gold. I agree, it would have most the same social features, which seems problematic since none of that is really in line with Bitcoin's original political vision, but I'm not sure Bitcoin's original political vision is anything more than a piece of nostalgia cherished by people sitting on the periphery of the contemporary Bitcoin economy, anyway, so maybe that's no big deal.

The bigger problem I see with Bitcoin relative to something like gold is that it has some troubling practicalities. It's theoretically much easier to steal vast sums of Bitcoin in one go (because 1,000,000 BTC wouldn't be quite as subject to conservation of momentum as a tonne of gold bars would be), and it's definitely much easier for vast sums of Bitcoin to accidentally poof off into a crypotgraphic pocket universe where nobody can reach it anymore.

>do you think the distribution of bitcoin will be somewhat equitable as we approach 2140

I don’t see why the distribution of anything would be “equitable”, outside of a communist utopia/dystopia. These days that word is mostly used by people exploiting the empathy of others to gain power for themselves.

Exactly. I came here to say this, but you've said it quite eloquently.

I'll just add that some inequality is also a good thing. If you don't have differential outcomes then you don't have a meritocracy where "better" is rewarded. You have a system where everyone is equally poor like the USSR and there is no incentive to improve.

I see what you're saying. Forgive my choice of wording. Perhaps "equitable" wasn't the correct choice.

I more meant whether it will become a currency of the people. Or a store of wealth for the average person.

I'm looking at this through an African lens. Bitcoin showed a lot of promise for cheap and reliable remittance payments and one day a fully fledged currency for the masses. Gave us Africans lots of hope in many ways.

These days I worry it is increasingly growing more difficult to acquire. It's no longer destined to benefit the people.

I don't mean to imply that everyone deserves an equal share. I hope I'm making sense. I guess I'm more wondering about its overall accessibility long term.

It's ironic. Bitcoin can only keep going up if it becomes more accessible and more people use it. Yet people resist making it more accessible. It's like they are betting on a failing technology stack that will blow up after x amount of users.

I don't see why Bitcoin's technology stack is failing if it's what is enabling its current value.

Keep in mind as well that the protocol is mutable as long as people agree to change it.

Saying BTC is doomed to fail as it's living alongside a multitude of other cryptocurrencies that attempt to solve its shortcomings is also a dubious proposition to me. Take for example the Mina Protocol[0], which eschews proof of work, huge blockchains, and slow transaction speeds for solutions built on top of zk-SNARKs.

If BTC has value as a long-term store of wealth, and if other cryptocurrencies exist to transact at faster rates with more liquid capital, and if that capital can flow between systems freely (as fast at BTC will allow), then every system is working as designed, right?

0: https://minaprotocol.com/

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