Bitcoin Forum

if bitcoin can not scale if alot of transaction is taking place, how would it reach to 1 million predicted by mcafee? mcafee talks about mining cost and limited supply of bitcoin. forgot what else he says. but if bitcoin can not scale. would it reach to 1 million? lets say alot of merchants are taking bitcoin but it have gotten slow like a bank. is it as useful now?

The price of $ 1,000,000 seems very optimistic.
For 2 years, much can be done to improve bitcoin technology.
But even now it does not have to be scaled, because there are a lot of currencies nominated in bitcoin you can use them.

The answer is already in your post which is the scalability issue. If bitcoin is unable to sort this out, it becomes pretty useless like we experienced back in December 2017. The high transaction fees and delay in confirmation will just encourage people to move to altcoins to carry out their transactions. This can lead to less demand of bitcoin and a sharp fall in its price.

If somehow bitcoin hits $1 million without sorting out its scalability issues then many other items usually considered as assets such as gold, real estate e.t.c will no longer remain so, as people will start hoarding/storing bitcoin instead.

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Sources:
#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem)
#2 https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf)
#3 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability_FAQ (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability_FAQ)
#4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke–hub_distribution_paradigm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke–hub_distribution_paradigm)

But do you think if we scale this year that 1 million can be reach in 2020?

So your argument is flawed at the beginning man. Although I have to agree that we need to scale at some time because its really one drawback that merchants are pointing to not embracing bitcoin. But if you look at mempool, everything is down including the fees.

I guess there will be really a lot of problems that will be thrown on bitcoin and question its usefulness. However, even if we didn't scale, we can still reach all-time-high in the future. The questions is where will you when bitcoin hit 1 million in the future? Don't be left out in the closet.

I think it will take decades for the bitcoin to reach to that price per coin. The views of people are changing dramatically now a days and everyone is thinking about the bitcoin as money making machine at the first move. If it reached 1 million then that would be the day when bitcoin would have been gone under mass changes and advance upgrades. So yes the scale up needs to be done and it has to be more lucid than the swift code technology which is nothing but traditional banking systems backbone. If we have to see bright future of the bitcoin then we have to look after its development and I would say this is in hands of those smart coders who are bitcoin enthusiast and willing to share their knowledge for the development purpose. Anyway the main issue has to be sorted first to see the sunrise really.

You forgot the interesting part of his statement Here (https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/935900326007328768) let's see if he'll gonna do that on the national TV as he promised to do.
It can possibly solve by a wide adaptation of Segwit or we can wait for the LN to be fully functional for the wide usage of our bitcoin transactions. Though there's a tiny possibility that bitcoin reaches 1M USD but the scaling must be fix.

Last year's massive jump in bitcoin's price lead to it becoming more popular than ever, which lead to a high traffic in the blockchain network, so miner fees were high and transactions were stuck for days to be confirmed, and this has made a lot of people question the sacalibility of bitcoin and how it will adapt to the massive flow of poeple and transactions in the future, and that is where the segwit fork came from, it was trying to aim to reduce the size of the transaction to make more of them fit into one block, so they can reduce transaction time and miner fees, it was supposed to launch in 28 of august, which a  lot of wallet providers siad that they will support it, but it was canceled and than said they will relaunch it with a differnet team in december and it did, but most of the online wallets like coinbase and blockchain don't support.

Bitcoin cannot reach 1 million dollars in 2020 even if it scales, that is simply impossible I think a huge number of things need to happen for bitcoin to reach that price and all of those things happening at the same time is so unlikely that many people like myself thinks it is impossible, however the solution is already being developed, the lightning network will make bitcoin scale, it will be able to send transactions for very low costs, the only problem is we do not know when it's going to be ready, the developers are still testing it and they are very through with their testings so it may take a while before we see it activated and running.

It is not possible to just reach it in two years, maybe half of million could be reached but for me 1m is a price that only after some years could be real, i can't imagine how world would be diffrent if btc get 1m in 2 years, many things would be just diffrent.

Because it can scale?

There is no way Bitcoin can reache 1 million $ unless the world would turn completely crazy. Just think at which capitalization would Bitcoin reach at that price, and compare it to the world's economy. And then you will tell me...

You pose a legitimate question, but have you forgotten the amount of craziness speculation can do to a certain asset?

Take for example, Tesla motors. Only a few electric cars have been bought yet the shares/stocks of the company has spiked in price. The hype surrounding Tesla motors and Elon Musk's crazy ideas has lead the company's stock prices to rapidly increase, without the cars nor the product doing something significant to boost the prices. Other crypto as well, such as Ripple, ETH, and bitcoin. To this day, no significant real world application can be gathered from the said coins yet speculation lead them to their crazy ATH prices.

Underestimating the power of FOMO and hype can lead to huge regrets, though $1M per coin is indeed too far-fetched.

Probably mcafee's prediction would not be reached by 2020 even if bitcoin scaled because it is too crazy IMO. Even if it is slow, it is still more useful than banks since money here cannot be FROZEN unlike in banks. You would only face problems if it is stolen. Nevertheless, I can't see bitcoin as a currency nowadays because most users use it merely for SPECULATION so don't expect many merchants taking bitcoin in the near future.

I don't believe anything of what John McAfee says lol. He is known for hyping some shitcoins and sell them at the peak of the pump to win big profits.
I can see the bitcoin price going up again in the future, but 1 million seems a little bit too high too reach  :D.

But put yourself in the shoes of the 2011 BTC enthusiast. If someone from 2018 went back in time to tell him that BTC would go up to $20,000, how do you think would he react?

Yeah, the same reactions we are having here. It may not be $1 million by 2020 but it might be on 2030.

1 million dollars is too big! Just imagine 2 years from now, the price will grow up 100x. Yet it is very optimistic prediction of John McAfee, it is impossible to happen since the price of bitcoin in 2018, is less than 10k dollars and there is a slow fluctuation of the price. It is too hard to reach 1M dollars specially, if the price as of now always moving down.

McAfee is a lunatic. He built a successful antivirus business, sold it for a fortune, pretty lost the vast majority of it in the financial collapse, and has been pretty unhinged since then. He was a person of interest in a murder in Belize, started his own political party, tried unsuccessfully to secure the Libertarian nomination for president in 2016, and generally says stupid things all the time now, like Bitcoin will be a million dollars by 2020. I wouldn't put much stock into anything he says.

IN 2017 JAN THE PRICE OF BITCOIN WAS AROUND 800$ AND WITH THE ENDING OF 2018 IT SHOWS THE HIGH OF 19500$ IF IT CAN SCALE MORE THAN 20x IN A YEAR THAN ACCORDING TO CURRENT PRICE IF IT SCALE 20x THEN IT WOULD PROBABLY GO TO 160,000$. NOW YOU YOURSELF THINK IF IT GIVES 20X ANOTHER TIME THAN IS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO REACH 1 MILLION $ TILL 2020. IT NOT IMPOSSIBLE ITS OBVIOUSLY POSSIBLE.

Forget about 2011 if someone told me at the beginning of the previous year that bitcoin will reach 20k before the year ended I would have thought of that person as crazy and yet it happened, the difference is that in order to reach 1 million dollars per bitcoin we will need a huge amount of the economy running on bitcoin and that is not possible yet and even if it was possible changes are never that fast it takes time to replace an old technology with a new one, so it is going to take decades before bitcoin becomes used everywhere and gets a shot at 1 million dollars.

1 million is really optimistic but in the crypto world, anything is possible.

I do think that we should diversify to coins like ETH and NEO which has a stronger use case than BTC if we really want to benefit.

Anyway I think it will take a year or 2 before we really see the market cap of crypto cross 1 trillion even.. so 1 mil for BTC will be a few years away

Chances to hit 1 million USD by the year 2020 has a slim possibility, we can consider the unpredictable environment of cryptocurrency and its future developments like LN which can increase the percentage of its chances because of its improved features, scaling solution and wide adaptation still it's an exaggerated prediction of price to consider with, I just heard that his price prediction is 500k dollars so the bet increased to 1 mln per bitcoin? can't wait for the outcome in 2020 there would be a consequence if he loses the bet read his statement.

McAfee is an asshole. Did you know that? I bet your ass you didn't. Why is it that do you want bitcoin's price to go to one million? A benchmark sort of shit? Oh give me a break. McAfee says shit and you buy it like a clod. Don't pay heed to that guy. Just learn about bitcoin is what I can tell you. If you don't, then it's on you.

It is possible to occur but I believe it will take time before it happens. 1 million is not a joke. Mcafee only predicted it, we can never know what will really happen in the next few years. If maybe btc reached 1 million then it seems to be the big news in the whole world be cause it hit the biggest value in the crypto market. And bitcoin will be the most popular cryptocurrency by that time.

1 million is somewhat a realistic figure, but definitely not attainable by 2020. There are scaling solutions in progress, but the challenge lies in how these solutions are accepted and how they help evolve the Bitcoin ecosystem to become a major part of the global financial system. Recently, FSB’s initial assessment about cryptocurrencies was that they don't pose risks to global financial stability at this time because the combined global market value was less than 1% of global GDP. If 1 million then 21 trillion (may be a lot less, lost coins) market cap, the GWP is approximately 78 trillion and for Bitcoin to reach somewhere the magic figure of 1 million then Bitcoin should be a dominant currency in the global economy, maybe hyperbitcoinization. Gold market share, global payment processing market share/ecommerce, stock market, remittances. The valuation should be sustainable.

There are yet various other factors beyond scalability which has driven bitcoin's price this much higher.Despite transactions being slower before few months,still we saw its price skyrocketing towards 20,000 dollars.So that's not a big issue concerning bitcoin's price.

And now as an added advantage,segwit activation has enabled transactions at very low fee.But still the price of 1 million within next two years seems to be unrealistic.

I can say bitcoin will not reach that value without the helps of its users and investors so we cannot predict it's prices but it reaches higher value by this situation so we cannot worry about that .

Diversifying can be a good choice but if you already have an amount of bitcoins you are comfortable with I think you do not really have any reason to diversify, bitcoin is the strongest cryptocurrency in the market by far and that is possibly not going to change in a long time if ever, so a case could be made that for those that got a decent amount of bitcoin they do not really need to do anything else except make sure they do not lose their bitcoin, for everyone else like us we need to try to diversify our investments in order to make more profits with the increased risk that carries.