Comment by gnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnerd | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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

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