Bitcoin Forum

What will the price of BTC be when 22 million people want 1 BTC each?


How far are we from this date?

Hmm...

I think we are pretty far from there. Also, when 22M people want bitcoin, I think they will want much less than 1 each by then. Too few coins.  :) (well "want" and "can acquire" are two different things I guess)

Yes. What is the solution? To count in mBTCs, Bitcoin cents, µBTCs, satoshis?

Good question to ask is what happens when 21,000,001 people want 1 BTC each. Not less.

22m people already want 1 BTC each. Just like 10,000 people on this forum want 2,200 bitcoins each. The only question is how much they want it.

21 Million people want 1 BTC = 1 BTC = $21 million

Right?

Right!!

Right??

Pretty obvious to me.

Right?

No, that's ridiculous.

or 12 million people

Forgot to use your alt acct?

LOL

there will only be 21M btc. and lost / seized btc need to be taken into account.

Exactly. It's a unit of value after all.

Busted!

No idea. But at that point, having 100,000,000 satoshis will be considered a status symbol.

"Wow! You have a WHOLE bitcoin?"

"Yeah, but I'm not gonna spend any of it because I like seeing 1.00000000 in my wallet."

It is hard to believe now, isn't it?  But it was a comment almost like this that my husband made that made me realize I wanted to invest.  I was a bit depressed we had not gotten in "early" when the price was a buck or so each.  But those days there was not much proof it was going to take off.  Now it is almost less of a gamble, even at $200, that this is going to be something huge!  One BTC could be worth quite a bit for sure.

About $1,136,363 = 1 BTC @ 7000M
About $3,741 = 1 BTC @ 22M ::)

Current exposure is at about 700k people

 :D

I feel like a damned idiot for worrying about fifty cent price changes when btc was at $10. It could drop $50 tomorrow and it wouldn't phase me now. :)

I don't think you can predict this one easily or with any equation..
if that 21 milion people were gonna buy 1 bitcoin each today the price would rise with every next bitcoin bought.. i think the price depends on present buy and sell orders, the momentary demand and supply and also the price history is important indicator, cause people get suggested by it. (If the average price is 100$ and somebody just bought all the bitcoins up to 300$ one would you sell one of yours for 100$ knowing how much they just got sold for minute ago?

I understand the question, and it does not have an easy answer.

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316297.0) is imho a quality read, concerning the distribution of bitcoins.

A large percent of the most active forum members have very high bitcoin balances and no intention to sell them. This must be taken into account when considering the situation that 20 million people want in. A really large slice of the cake is taken by the big holders.

It is mathematically improbable, not only to have more than 21 million holders of BTC1, but actually to have even 2 million such holders! To have more than 5 million is flat out impossible if free market remains and the large holders are not coerced out of their holdings.

Goat, I know the proof of my findings is not yet there in an unrefutable form, but the fact remains.

What comes to the topic, an easy estimate is ofter better than a difficult one (extrapolate):
year end - users - price
2009 - 20
2010 - 200 - 0.5
2011 - 2000
2012 - 20k
2013 - 200k - 500
2014 - 2M
2015 - 20M - 50k.

It is not inconceivable that when 22 million people have some bitcoins, one goes for $50k.

Oh there is plenty of coin for all people. Because there is also Litecoin, Megacoin, Novacoin, Feathercoin, etc.

You're looking at it one way only, you may consider the other side as well.
How many USD/EUR/CNY those 22M want to put in BTC?

Wealth distibution in a system tends to look like a Pareto distribution where a smaller portion of folks own a large amount of the resourcel, and an even smaller function of those individuals own the majority of that resource set. For example, 20% of people might control 80% of the wealth, and 20% of those folks (4% of the population) control 80% of that wealth (64%) total, and so forth.

There's no reason to believe bitcoin won't be similarly distibuted, it's just a matter of whether it's 80/20, 90/10, 70/30, etc. It's already that way in Bitcoin. Satoshi controls about 1 million coins, there's a few individuals/groups that have several 100K of coins, then a slightly larger group that is over 10K (Vladimir club), and so on.

That will never happen.

I will always want more than 1 Bitcoin ;)

How many users do we currently have?

How much is this number?

In the other thread I referred to Silvervault customer data. There I have percentages of people who have had a position but sold out, and also people who have registered but never bought anything. Silvervault was opened 1.7.2010, which is eeriely similar to MtGox... Applying these percentages to the number of downloaded clients would be a fair estimate.

Maybe we already have 22M users.

316,000 and rapidly rising by 1-2k a day at coinbase

No, you can't know from that question. Here is another way. It works  since we are talking of money, which have no use value.

What will the price of BTC be when 21M people want enough BTC to buy a pair of shoes?

Then the answer is 1BTC is the value of one pair of shoes, currently about 500 yuan.

So when 210 million people wants the exact same thing, BTC = 5000 yuan.

Maybe, just answering the question in the title. You know, every time you buy something, you marginally raise the price of the type of thing you would buy, and at the same time you marginally lower the price of money (expressed in any good). That is why the value of money rise, when users want to hold money.

Just imagine when Bitcoin goes mainstream and 5% of the world's population (400M people) want to use bitcoin. Where is the price then?

The answer to the OP is no price will allow for 21M people to own at least 1 BTC, from the simple fact that there are many people who currently own more than 1 BTC and will always own at least a few coins. For 21M people to own BTC means that many will have to settle for having much less than 1.0 BTC in total. This is why the price has so much room to grow...

What is all this silliness about me forgetting to change accounts? That doesn't even make sense. I just thought this thread was ridiculous, so I commented in it with complete absurdity.  "21 Million people want 1 BTC = 1 BTC = $21 million" doesn't make any sense. Just like this thread.

And then I just commented on my own absurd equation by calling it "ridiculous."

I swear, the # of tin foil hats around here completely disrupts everyones since of satire and sarcasm.

So, right, go ahead and ignore me, so you can better pick up that radio signal.

What will the price of BTC be when 22 million people know that bitcoin is not gold and that there are many altcoins which work exactly like bitcoin?

What will the price of BTC be when the major exchanges like MtGox, Btcchina & co. add other coins on their platform?

The price will be 7.

They would get alt instead of BTC :)

Why is gold much more valuable than silver, despite that it has way less actual uses? Why is dollar more valuable than gold, even though everyone knows that it is a unit of unpayable debt from a bankrupt government?

Marketability. Salability. Hoardability.

You can use dollar everywhere, whereas gold you must sell and convert, and that happens differently in every country, involving hassle and fees. With silver, the situation is pathetic, and despite being the layman's money for 25 centuries, it does not function as currency anywhere today.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu tells that 50 kilograms of silver is enough for upkeep of a 100,000-strong army for one day. Today that same amount has a purchasing power of mere $35k. I venture to guess that 35M is required today. This is an illustration that monetary elements' valuation can change over time when changes in their monetary properties occur.

As a investment silver merchant, I am very much aware that silver is "poor man's gold". For a rich man the difficulty of obtaining a large holding of silver is prohibitive. Buffett bought silver in the 1990s, and it took years for him to receive it, for the sellers had difficulty procuring it from the market. Silver price and silver lease rates shot up 50%. He was instructed to sell the holding before it caused more disruption to the silver market. Then I know a person who owned a few million$ worth of silver, and had to do it via banks due to the lach of physical merchants. He too was swindled out of his holdings. I am pretty much the "highest" guy who can own silver free of government intervention. Even if this wasn't the problem, the problem is the fact that buying and selling so much is a large international operation. Even for people less wealthy than me, silver is often too much of a hassle especially as most of its attributes are found in gold, you essentially trade some leverage for marketability. The largest practical silver holding is less than $100k and do not expect to trade it because dealers will suck you dry. Something that sucks so bad in hoardability cannot be money. (Silvervault (http://www.silverbank.net) is my creation that is designed to empower physical silver to work as money; currently it has not succeeded in the main mission but is well functioning as a depository.)

Gold fares a little (2 orders of magnitude :) ) better, because you can pack 100 times the value of silver in the same space. Market does not collapse if you try to buy and sell $1 million worth of physical gold, it is always available (well not always, but that is again those behind-the-scenes things, which are not the main issue here). Even countries have gold reserves, but gold is currently so cheap that the largest players who want gold (China, Russia) cannot buy it from the market since the largest holders (international bankers) are not selling. Even a humble request to get back the gold that you own (Germany, from USA) is turned down. Finland knows better to not even ask for its reserves. (When Bank of Finland was questioned this, the answer was that they are happy that gold is safely stored in London and other places. My interpretation: no chance to ever see the gold.)

The basis of dollar's value is in its monetary attributes. If it was not so ubiquituos and accepted everywhere, I highly doubt that it would be able to reach its current dominance. After 150 years of dirty tricks, assassinations, coups, puppet governments, wars with millions of deaths, and the building of a socialist system that constitutes 50% of the economic activity, it has this role, though. Companies that produce stuff and have been profitable for decades in a row, do not enjoy the same credit rating and must pay higher interest. The reason is that companies are smaller and the marketability of their debt is thus weaker. Midsize corporations also have the political risk of running into adversities if they do not conform to the unwritten rules of their domicile, no matter how solid the business was. "Democratic" governments cannot default on their debts, this was by the way a major reason why England gained dominance in 1700s - interest rate was lower, boosting investment. In the continent, kings needed to pay more, since the successor did not always assume their debts.

That some good gains a monetary status (that it acts as money) is not an everyday occurrence. In very early times it has been hypothesized that salt and cattle were used as money. When metals became available, they became the money par excellence, not always available to the public due to their high price, but being the unit of value, medium of exchange in large purchases, and especially store of value. This has continued until present day, only in the 20th century has the common perception of what is money, changed from metal to numbers of an abstract unit.

That some good gains a dominant monetary status, does not happen in once per millennium. There is no explicit evidence that this has ever been occurred before the coercion-induced switch from gold to fiat in the 1900s. (It is debatable whether silver was dominant to gold prior to 1800s, because the values of their monetary stocks ("market caps") were in the same ballpark.) The reason why a money cannot gain dominance over another, is that a good money has the least possible inflation. To have a 1.2% inflation of gold today, the money supply would only about triple in 100 years. But if it grows so slowly, you never get started with your new money! There needs to be a stock to begin with, and it must grow at maximum very slowly.

Ripple is an example of model, where money supply is fixed, but distribution is according to the whims of a soviet.

Bitcoin is an example of model, where money supply is fixed, and distribution happens over more than 100 years according to a predetermined model where everyone can participate in a free market fashion.

Ripple has at times been more valuable than Bitcoin, so the jury is still out. If people continue to buy ripples and keep the exchange rate up, it does not matter how OpenCoin distributes the stash. But I doubt that the fad will last, because XRP as a currency is hardly any improvement over USD, and is currently a terrible underdog in acceptance. (Can you buy anything with XRP?)

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a genuine improvement over both gold and USD. It is the most hoardable, since you can store and move an arbitrary amount of wealth as easily as you buy a sandwich. It has transactional capabilities which, when fully implemented, outdo all that Visa and PayPal can even dream of in their dollar economy.

And it has a 2-year (2 orders of magnitude) lead over the nearest competitor, Litecoin. Even if you consider Litecoin to be technically superior to Bitcoin (I don't), it is a minor tweak and not a generational improvement. At present I cannot imagine anything which would be so much superior to Bitcoin than Bitcoin is to U.S. Dollar, and therefore it is not just improbable, but outright impossible that an altcoin would take over Bitcoin.

Summary: Nothing prevents the public from buying gold or even silver, if they like. Altcoins will remain in niche applications, but the market cap ratio between Bitcoin and best altcoin will be on average 50:1, as is the market cap ratio between gold and silver, its nearest competitor.

By then, it would have become apparent that Bitcoin doesn't scale so the price should be close to 0.

Germany did good by asking because they US at least was forced to pay for the right to return the gold later. No this is not better than having the gold now but better than not having it AND not receiving a fee.

It is always nice to read your long elaborations on monetary theory and history. Thank you for sharing!

You suggest everyone will create his own altcoin? Then these altcoins will be worth nothing because no one will want exchange something for this

Gold and silver have been money for almost 6000 years of history... Gold is a rare precious metal but also has unique properties. Gold is indispensable to science and technology because of its physical properties, it is highly reflective and malleable, it's an excellent conductor, it does not rust, tarnish or corrode, and gold does not dissolve in water or most acids. In 10,000 years, gold will still be gold, but bitcoin won't exist anymore.

The US held more gold than any other nation and it helps to give the world confidence and the US dollar credibility...


Most People don't care if Litecoin is technically superior to Bitcoin or not. They just want the best coin to pump and dump... This is the sad reality.

No way, not even close. If we're at a million i'd be shocked.

Wikipedia reports 39% of the world's people use the internet. That's 2.7B people that have a chance to learn about bitcoin. A million of those is 1 in 2700.

Ripple team has stated that they do not want energy to be wasted in generating the money supply. In other words, they want to get something from nothing. In the real world things don't go this way. If you have paid a lot for something, you value it more, and with Bitcoin you are guaranteed to pay the going price (if you buy outright) or even more (if you start mining).

No free bitcoins have ever been. In 2009 when you could have mined thousands, the "exchange rate" was so low that you would have done better working at McDonalds (unless you saw the vision of the whole thing and just needed the amount of coins, like Satoshi, or the guy in the Reddit post). Later on and when MtGox opened, it has been more profitable to buy from an exchange, which means that the actual value is paid in return.

Hard to predict, but how can we be sure this is not already the case?

I guess there could be some strange persons like that, maybe they should buy 1.2 just incase they want to spend some.

Hahaa... for some time I have encouraged to buy a little bit more over the "cold storage" amount. Like BTC1,200 :)

That would be a little bit difficult these days...