Bitcoin Forum

So we will need another $2,000,000,000 just to maintain current prices?!

And we are making a big deal out of the "100's of millions" Wall Street could theoretically bring in soon?

I just went from extremely bullish to "Wow, I guess this is why bitcoins are still an incredibly high risk asset". 

At the current rate, about 1.3 million bitcoins are created per year (though this rate is expected to be halved late 2015 / early 2016).

This isn't anything new, this rate of creation has been set when Bitcoin was first launched in 2009. So anyone buying into Bitcoin should be aware of it.

However, if you put it into perspective, then you'll see that the amount of bitcoins is increased by roughly 10% per year. That means that in order to keep the price at the current level, the amount of people that want to own bitcoins should increase by that much. And interest in Bitcoin is growing far more quickly than 10% per year.

Please, Bro ... don't associate Wall Street and Bitcoin in the same phrase.
The first collapse the world ... but everything have an end (matrix style).

http://media2.giphy.com/media/bAYRpg4wGM1MY/200_s.gif

By "we will need another $2,000,000,000 just to maintain current prices?" you're assuming that every single bitcoin that's mined over the period in question is sold.  That isn't going to happen.  There are a lot of people who will hold their mined Bitcoins for a long, long time.

That's not how markets work. Market-cap and flow are entirely different things. For example, if the last trade was $630, and there's a 0.10BTC sell order at $632, and it gets filled, someone spent $63.2 to bump the market-cap from $8,190,000,000 to $8,216,000,000. So $63.2 in trading upped the market-cap by $26,000,000.

Obviously markets are usually more balanced than the above (lots of orders getting rapidly filled from both sides of the book), but the point is basically that if you have a thin market, tiny amounts of money can move the market cap significantly, so you can't really make statements like yours above.

It's going to be very interesting seeing the price action in 8 years time when only 2 million coins remain to be mined...

I heard it only need $500k for last few month ...

I would argue that today, most of the coins that are mined are eventually sold on the market, as electricity costs are high as a percentage of bitcoins mined and miners need to pay their electric bill.

The OP is correct in saying that ~$2 billion in additional capital is needed in order to maintain current prices over the next two years, however much more then that flowed into bitcoin just last year, and hundreds of millions have flowed into bitcoin via VC last and this year.

One thing that the OP forgot to mention is that ~after this 2 year period is over the block subsidy will half again so less bitcoin will be generated ever day/week/year

i hope bitcoin is here to stay because I am making tons daily now  ;D

Its so funny how some narrow minded ppl are.

They only look at speculative market of bitcoin and completely ignore the fact that..... $2 billion is NOTHING compared to an annual revenue of a payment network like Visa. And thats just one of bitcoin's features/utilities.

Same with me, i'm mining with a 1PH/s secret machine.  I'm rich, BITCHES!

Yeah, I also heard that something like 13 million bitcoins have been created in the last five and a half years.  :)

I would argue that this is an example of how people can use statistics to try to manipulate facts. If the OP had mentioned that bitcoin's market cap had increased by several times his $2 billion figure just last year then what he is saying would basically be a non-event.

Not going to happen. Sorry.