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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

holy cr!9 - I was thinking of trying to mine some to get a handle on the whole thing - last week when it was 800 bucks.What the hell?

If I understand it, there is a upper limit to number of bitcoins available ever - what is that number and when will it be equal to the total asset value of the planet? I mean is it feasible that bitcoins could really work?

Edit: ok there is a limit of 21million bitcoins by 2030, and a world assignable wealth of ~210 trillion USD. So, if bitcoin works and can be the repository for all worlds currency, it would have to be worth 10,000 USD per bitcoin.

Then any growth in value.

So ... this might just work folks. And if not it still makes for a great DHT

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>Edit: ok there is a limit of 21million bitcoins by 2030, and a world assignable wealth of ~210 trillion USD. So, if bitcoin works and can be the repository for all worlds currency, it would have to be worth 10,000 USD per bitcoin.

By my math, that's 10,000,000 USD per BTC.

quite right - I blame man flu and a very fuzzy head.

There will be just under 21 million in 2140, but you have to remember many BTC private keys have been destroyed over the last few years so those can never be spent (unless they used a deterministic wallet, in which case they will probably be able to be cracked eventually).

I don't think it will ever be equal to the total world asset value. If it succeeds it will be in the short term as an online currency, in which case if it were to have a market cap the size of APPL, it would be around $36000 per coin. If it were to get long term use as a deflationary reserve currency to mitigate inflation and the Triffin Dilemma (which is what China was pushing for in 2009 when Zhou Xiaochuan released his paper[1]) then the price could easily clear $1000000 but keep in mind that is far from guaranteed as BitCoin still has some major scaling issues to sort out.

Too much growth too soon might be a bad thing.

[1] http://www.bis.org/review/r090402c.pdf

EDIT: In response to your edit, it is 2140, not 2030. The block reward (what miners get for solving a block) halves every 4 years and we are at a 25BTC reward (made every 10 minutes) with about 12 million BitCoins in existence, so it will take longer than this century to hit the 21 million mark.

It could also be a very good thing, since it would clear the way for a competitor that solves many issues that bitcoin have.

Thank you - will get stuck into that paper.

So it seems ridiculously unfair that 50% of bitcoins now exist and it will taper off for another 130 years. I think the idea of a digital currency is here to stay. Bitcoins as a specific implementation seems so off kilter due to that one fact alone that I really don't see how to start it "fairly". it may not be possible (it's not "fair" that the queen has all the money - but that's now a stable equilibrium)

It does seem unfair but that's just how it goes. For instance consider that a third of the worlds gold ever mined comes from one country, South Africa. That's a bit geographically unfair. Since South Africa was in the empire (and now still in the CommonWealth), it means the mining rights for that gold went to Britain and other friendly countries. That's a bit politically unfair.

Or consider when gold became the gold standard in the 19th century, a lot of that gold was controlled by a single family, the Rothschild's because of success 100 years earlier though Mayer Amschel Rothschild. That is a bit unfair.

Economics has never been fair. Say you bootstrapped a new digital currency and gave it out to all the people in the world evenly and they all recognised it as holding value, eventually through luck, and intention, some people will have more of that currency than others.

The way BitCoin was bootstrapped took into account that the earlier someone got on board, the higher the risk they took. So if you think of it that way, its not completely unfair.

As a trading currency, it works fine.

As a store of value, it's deflationary nature makes it unsuitable for widespread adoption. An economy doesn't function well if people get rich merely by holding the currency (as opposed to investing the currency).

Bitcoin is deflationary by design. As a store of value, this is the ideal characteristic (as your store keeps gaining value).

Of course it's feasible. It already "works": i.e. I can buy things with it, which is how currency works. Will it displace all other currencies? Unlikely. There are major barriers such as lack of financial services, difficulty of use in any area without Internet (which is lots of places worldwide), volatility, etc, but there's no fundemental reason it can't work.

it does not need to displace them I guess - same way Euro does not need to displace USD, just needs to be a viable alternative. Which I suspect means being a viable repository of value of all current wealth so it can have a stable exchange rate

I am interested in its ability to be a more secure Distributed hash table ala namecoin, but the tulip mania has me itching to just start mining. Oh well, why did I not start earlier?

BTW do we know how many coins have been produced to date?

About 12 million coins have been produced. The reward halved a few months ago, so mining is probably not your best bet now. Of course, if the value increases, then I'm wrong, but mining is quickly becoming a professionals game.

If you're mining for profit then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Most don't even make their money back on a mining machine [1]. Do it for the education and experience. Don't do it for the profit.

1. http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

I think you missed a few zeros: $10,000,000 USD/btc. Also, btc is more akin M1 or currency in circulation--not total wealth. I'd guess world M1 supply is more around $10 trillion, so btc needs to go to $500k per USD to have the equivalent value.

thank you - M1 is a much better measure.

jeez - 1000 bucks is looking like a bargain.

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