Bitcoin Forum

And if it does, that is the lowest amount you could send. See a problem?

not sure if you're serious but that would not happen. not in thousand years.
if 1 satoshi equals $1 then 1btc is worth $100.000.000 which is something you only can fantasy about.

Why won't they just code in the option for another decimal mark over?

I think that after 1 satoshi worth $1, then the bitcoin system will be upgraded that the min. amount will not be 0.00000001 BTC.

They could, but it would require a hard fork. Doable, but still this creates a problem.


I don't this BTC will ever get that high, but some people think it will. And so I was presenting this problem.


Possible ;)

I think before we are talking about adding so many zeros and worrying about such a thing, it would be more sensible to talk about whether and when will it ever go to 1000. I'm not denying that it could never happen as anything is possible with bitcoin, but would just like to be realistic for now even with the slightest possibility

No I do not think that 1 satoshi will be valuable 1 dollar (at least not in 5-10 years). I think instead in the next 50-60 years maybe we can talk 1 satoshi = ~ 0.25 dollar (but it is only a simple supposition we cannot anticipate the future).

at that point, a can of pop will cost a few thousand dollars at least, so there really is very little use for cents. So it's not a problem.

It could. But it probably wont. But if it did below is a solution:


Some people have said 1 bitcoin could be worth a million, but I doubt it. I'm hoping for a few thousand dollars at least.

As mentioned, it would take a while to get there (if ever). At that point, Bitcoin being digital, if more decimal places are needed they can very easily be added.

Sure, anything is possible or so they say. But may be at that time the value of $ 1 won't be the same as it is now.

See what I mean.. ?

Only when a loaf of bread costs $1,000,000, so not until USD completely hyper inflates and widespread uprising happens. So, not likely during our lifetime. If it did happen, would it be a problem? no because $1 won't buy anything anyway, so it won't pose any problems

If the dollar hyperinflates, yes, of course, in the same way that a satoshi is now already worth more than a Reichsmark.

However, if you mean: can a satoshi ever be worth more than what a dollar is worth NOW, then definitely no.

Because it would mean that the market cap of bitcoin would be 2 000 trillion $

Now, the current WORLD market cap of M2 money is estimated to be of the order of 50 trillion $.

That, I can deal with.

OP, technically is possible, if it ever happens we can have bitcoin to be divisible beyond 8 decimal places, but like the poster said, it's not going to happen realistically.

No other solution except a hard fork to add decimals.
Most probably the hard fork will become the accepted version of Bitcoin.

When this happens, the block reward will most probably be zero or close to zero.
Apart from this being the lowest amount to send, transaction fees might also become uncompetitive (they can't be below 1 satoshi.  :) )

1 satoshi will eventually achieve parity with US$0.01, in the future. No more, no less.

Damn, I didn't know it was to be set in stone, stonerider.

I AM SATOSHI NAKAMOTO!!!

Damn, I had you pictured more like this
http://teewallpapers.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ghost-rider-wallpaper-2.jpg

than this.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiJjrWnCMAAdxC5.jpg

Still just as badass, though.

And when it happens even a novice can get rich quick in the first day of the faucet. After that bitcoin will disappear and stay memorable

Anyone who has one Satoshi could sell it for a dollar this afternoon. All we need now is to find an escrow and this thread is fulfilled.

Good idea! Here is my post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=986653.0

If 1 sat happens to be worth $1 at a certain date, then I need to do everything to find my old wallet files that I probably deleted.

They contain like 1k-200k sat each :D But I'm glad I will not need to do so.

If that time comes, you still won't need to find your 1k Satoshi wallets, just as you won't waste time trying to find a lost penny now. Or 1/100th of a penny.

I read somewhere that if all the currencies around the world (USD,GBP,Euro, Peso, ect) were to be combined and Bitcoin was given the same value as that, then one Satoshi would equal around .02 cents. So no, I don't think one satoshi will ever be worth $1.00

Yes you're almost right.It's approximately 35 trillion (10^12). So this would be 0,0166666 cents for 1 Satoshi.

why only count currencies and not assets valuation?
i think assets are into hundreds of trillions
Total GDP is 30 tril/year
Total Earth value is apparently at least 1.95x10¹⁷ or 195 quadrillions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_Earth
total number of satoshis=2.1 quadrillions
so, value of BTC at sat=$1 will be 1% of Earth value

One can also possibly imagine in >200 years, people forming sidechains (to remove btc permanently from earth-based blockchain) to buy things on other planets (blockchain info cannot be readily synced with planets light years away)

You folks are thinking 3-dimensionally.  Add in the next dimension, time.  Take a look at historical monetary supply charts.  Take a look at historical global GDP charts.  Look at the historical gross world product.  These things grow at an exponential rate.  Assuming the USD doesn't disappear entirely, or completely change in nature (e.g. cryptographic fixed-supply USD), a $1 satoshi is a mathematical certainty.  The question is only: when?

Because in order for bitcoin to take their value, they should loose their value of course.

If bitcoin is to take the value of all M2 monetary mass in fiat, then all that fiat will loose its value (to bitcoin).  That's not entirely unthinkable (but almost so).  However, if bitcoin is going to take also the value of your house, then your house would have no value any more !

Money is of course always a subset of all assets, because its purpose is to exchange it against the other assets.  And many of these other assets have a lower "velocity" than money.  You don't trade your house every 6 months, do you ?  

If you'd consider the "market cap" of bitcoin equal to "all that has value", then nothing else would have value (and immediately, bitcoin, which has no other use than store of value, would loose it entirely, because it can only serve to be exchanged against something else).

That most or all fiat would loose its value to crypto currencies, I could eventually accept conceptually.  However, that all fiat would loose its value to BITCOIN, is unthinkable, simply because the number of fiat tranactions runs in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, and bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second.

By the time a satoshi becomes a dollar, the USD would be worthless leading to a price that high. That's the only thing I can see.

fee would be not that high, compared to the fact that everyone will be rich already, because even holding 0.01 will mean millionaire

If it turns to $1 i would be freaking rich even holding with 80k sat but it seems impossible to happen.

no, satoshi knows that real price for 1 sat is 1 cent
:)

it may be, after many years

This part I can't get my head around.  If a 'currency' is a measure of an actual asset (swerving the money as debt issue) rather than the asset itself (meaning that you don't include money as part of 'all that has value' but rather, a proxy of something that has value), then it would surely mean that comparing satoshi to USD would become meaningless since it would have become its replacement, but comparing it to a house would still stand.  After all, aren't we valuing houses with USD right now?  It's just the measuring stick that changes.

For the Satoshi = 1USD scenario, I can't see it as even remotely likely, but if it were to happen, we could just add another byte onto the protocol and get 8 more decimal places.  Sure it would be a hard fork, but that's not as negative as it could sound.  It's not like people would be losing something by conforming to consensus, and could be planned well in advance.  I mean they managed to pull of the switch over to Euro (crazy as that was), and that did mean people started rounding up prices for ease of mental comfort, but adding decimal places rather than changing the measuring stick would be a walk in the park by comparison.

You can value a house with the measure stick "dollar" or BTC, but that doesn't mean that the market cap of actually existing dollars include that value of course.

You can also measure the value of your house in apples or eggs or loaves of bread.  Anything that has a certain value, can be used as a "measure stick" for anything else that has value.  A currency is no exception to that.  This essentially comes about because of the transitivity of prices: if asset A is worth x times asset B (that is, if on the free market, you can trade A for x times B or vice versa), and if asset B is worth y times asset C (that is, if on the free market, you can trade B for y times C), then: asset A will be worth xy times asset C. 

Because if it weren't, by going in circles you could get an arbitrary amount of value (arbitrage).

Of course, this is assuming totally liquid markets, which in reality they aren't, so transitivity of prices is only approximatively true.
But that means that you can measure anything against anything else.

Mind you, because markets are dynamical, prices change all the time, exchange rates change all the time.  Transitivity is valid, but only if you take all prices (exchange rates) at the same moment.  Tomorrow, the values of the coefficients x and y will be different, but a priori, transitivity will still hold with these new values.

So a "measure stick" of value can be any asset. 

And now you see why using a measure stick doesn't mean anything for the market cap of the asset you use as a yard stick.

You could just as well measure the value of your house in eggs, but that doesn't mean that the market cap of all eggs in the world include all houses.

This is not gonna happen unless all governments/countries on the earth claim Bitcoin is only legal currency, but it did seem unlikely, we got enough unequal distribution.

1 satoshi will never worth $1. Everyone will dump their bitcoin before that happens. I know I would. Look at the charts, $1000 for 1btc is a stretch, $10000 is fairly tale.

If (and by the time) that happens, i believe bitcoin will be openly accepted and dominating the world market, which means that there will be no problems in
using it at merchants even for smaller transactions.

For example; you buy a gum thats 0,5$, and pay with 1 satoshi (since its a minimum), and the merchant returns you 0,5$ change.
That wasnt do hard now was it? For every problem theres a solution, and having a good development team, even the unsolvable problems can be solved with changing certain parts of bitcoin,
even tho that would mean having to fork it.

cheers

That's totally possible if bitcoin were just used for store of retirement fund alone, not even mention other usage

The world population is increasing at 370K per day, and bitcoin net supply on market is about 5000 coins, that gives each person 1,350,000 satoshi to use to store his retirement fund, if that fund is 1,350,000 dollar, which is a decent amount in today's standard, but might not be a big deal in 20 years after continuously inflation of USD, then 1 satoshi will equal 1 dollar

Another way to calculate is use MV=PQ formula, where M is 2100 trillion satoshi, V is 0.05 e.g. money saved for use every 20 years, and Q is world GDP at 72 trillion USD, then you get a P of 1.45 satoshi per USD, more or less in the same magnitude

Money in retirement funds have the slowest move speed thus impact the money supply in the most significant way, other usages like daily trading or monthly spending does not have the same effect on money supply

I just discussed the effect of mirroring the economy into bitcoin by passing all the transactions through it

An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollars
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=987110.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=987110.0)

But in that case V will be more than 12 (monthly turnover), then the effect on P is very limited, 100 satoshi for a USD is enough to deal with the world GDP

And suppose that some day bitcoin becomes some kind of world reserve fund, and will be stored for more than 70 years for some countries, then it will give it an even larger push

Seriously $1 for 1 Satoshi?  :o Today 10000 Satoshi also isn't worth $1 and I just stopped using Satoshi's when I did a job worth about 25000 Satoshis which took me 2 days and I got to know the price I earned was less than $0.3.

1 Satoshi could be worth $0.01 soon though LOL :D

What's even funnier is there are 100's of old posts that say $100 BTC is a fairy tale.   Not sure what a fairly tale would be ;)

I could live with 1 satoshi being worth 1/10th of a cent (aka $100K per BTC)  ;)

That sounds amazing but even 0.01$ as @coinableS said is amazing too!Everything can happen in Bitcoin World..who knows..  8)

Kind Regards,
BTC-Bank.

Yes, if dollar hyper-inflates

I said $0.001.  Mr Mis-quoter ;)

That's a funny way to look at it.  In principle you're right of course, but....

it would mean that the full world GDP would be bought with the very tiny amount of BTC that is NOT in saving funds.  After all, you have the difficulty that on one hand, all the BTC would be in funds which are frozen for 20 years, and on the other hand, all transactions happen in BTC (if you want the world GDP to be bought in BTC, in order for your formula to work).

It means that the world GDP is actually bought each year by a very very tiny fraction of all BTC while most of it remains enclosed in 20-year funds, which makes that the 72 trillion USD pump up the value of the BTC market cap to 1448 trillion. 
The danger would of course be that this high market cap would induce people to cash in their BTC, increasing V drastically, and make the value of a BTC drop at the same rate.

Imagine that you have your retirement savings in such a 20-year holding fund.  And imagine now that most people decide to empty their funds, and spend all of their BTC in a year's time (they could in principle buy 20 times the world GDP with it !).  That will crash the BTC value a 20-fold.  You loose your retirement savings a 20-fold.

I wouldn't want to have my savings in something that had its value because 95% of it is not liquid, and the full market is actually carried by the 5% circulating (like maybe right now with BTC !).  The moment people decide to put their stash in circulation, the value of it would crash 20-fold !


The problem with the relation between V and T (the holding times) is that V is the harmonic average of the inverse holding times, and not the arithmetic average.

As such, short holding times dominate over long holding times. 
If you have 90% of the monetary mass on 20-year hold, and 10% of the monetary mass in a 1-year hold, the average "hold" time (1/V) is NOT 0.9 x 20 + 0.1 x 1 = 18.1 year, but rather: 1/(0.9/20 + 0.1/1) = 6.9 years.  That 10% circulating once every year brings down the 20 year period to a 6.9 year period.  In other words, those 10% circulating 20 times faster, make the value drop by a factor of about 3.

So you see the huge danger of having the value of a monetary asset be dominated by extremely low V: the slightest fraction that starts circulating faster will make the value drop drastically.

Hahaha my bad! I think my mind want to see it as 0.01$ but to correct it even 0.001$ is amazing too!!!  :)

Kind Regards,
BTC-Bank.

I have not thought about it clearly when I quote the formula, maybe the Q in the formula should not be the world GDP, but just a part of it, which consists only consumption by retirees (40% of the GDP?). As a retiree, you will never dump all your retirement funds at once unless in some extreme condition. And a retirement fund can use time lock mechanism to lock the coin until 20 years later. And the exchange rate will not jump to 100 million during one night but gradually over a long period of time

In fact, if invest in bitcoin now, you might not need to hold it for 20 years, 10 years are enough. And by then you retire, bitcoin will worth about 100K to 1 million, and you don't want to cash out everything since it still have large appreciation potential, you will only need to cash out enough to live a comfortable life, why cash out if you could not find any investment more valuable than bitcoin long term wise

And for people join the investment 10 years later, they will face a much higher exchange rate like Berkshire hathaway's stock, and they will invest in unit of satoshi instead of bitcoin, that appreciation potential still stands but eventually will slow down to the same speed that GDP grows

That's pretty much every asset class out there though. You couldn't liquidate a fraction of the gold or stocks out there in the world without turning the value to dust.

That's why BTC will be an interesting case. It could be a hybrid of currency and asset class. I've no idea what that would do to the eventual value.

Very true, it is amazing that many people truly believe that they have some wealth stored in their gold/land/bond and then they just sit on big pile of those assets and never cash out them. As we have seen, a slightest cash out of houses will crash the whole economy that is built upon it

And you are right that bitcoin is different, since you might never need to cash out it when the time comes, you just need to spend it, thus will not cause its value to fall (FED has proved that printing 5x more money will just make USD stronger)

the market will decide!
exciting times ahead

Technically it's possible, but realistically isn't. 100K per Bitcoin isn't as farfetched tho, and considered a serious posibility by top hedge fund investors.

i am curious as to how one may discount it to todays value.
I think that there is a formula.
i tried to use Black-Sholes.
with 10 year time to maturity, 100% volatility (don't know how to precisely calculate this), spot price of 283 and strike price 100000 i am getting $93 value, which basically means that IF price will reach 100000 in 10 years, $93 of current $283 price is basically a call value on bitcoin value in 10 years.
However, if intrinsic price is ~$100 ( just electricity cost of mining), then ~$183 is option premium, corresponding to bitcoin price (strike) in 10 years at ~$6500
you can play with this here
http://www.danielsoper.com/fincalc/calc.aspx?id=37

As stated above, it could be divided further but odds are One Dollar will not buy what 10cents buy Today when 1satoshi=1Dollar

The shortest to the point answer is the best i read here, nobody knows how much a single satoshi will be or could be worth in future but the funny thing is we all know but we have only decided for this point in time the future is when we will decide as buyers /the market what we believe it will be worth i have my doubts we will see that price though lol

In time, when last BTC is mined, there will be less and less Bitcoins and more and more Dollars so figure out what can be in say 50-100 years. Bitcoin dont inflate, it deflate cause lot of coins are and will be lost so there will never be 21M of coins. Anything is possible. I dont see fiat monetary system as it is now can even survive 50-100 years.

We'll see what happens.

Possible but quite unlikely. If Bitcoin were to replace all the fiat in the world in every single country, it would reach about $1 million per coin for a total market cap of about $21 trillion (actually it's slightly less than this due to some coins being lost over time). In that case, 1 satoshi would still only be worth 1 cent.

However, if this happens in the very distant future then it's possible that USD could lose 99 percent of its value due to simple inflation. If this happened, 1 USD by then would be worth 0.01 USD today. The dollar has already lost 96 percent of its value since 1913 so it's not impossible. So perhaps once Bitcoin is fully mined in the year 2140, 1 satoshi being worth 1 USD might be possible. Not that it really matters however since a coffee would cost you $300.

And finally, there is also the risk of hyperinflation. It happened in Germany. It happened in Hungary. It happened in Yugoslavia. And most recently, it happened in Zimbabwe. It could happen in the US too. This would have the same result as above although it would obviously happen much faster.

Additional note: If Bitcoin reached a status comparable to that of gold, then it would reach roughly $350,000. That would be a more realistic scenario.

People on this forum are too optimistic, do you think 1ug(1g=1000000ug) gold could become worth $1, obviously the answer is no, it's the same for Bitcoin.

Did you grow up reading the Beano?

Not sure why it would matter what he grew up reading to be honest, his point is if inflation continues and turns to hyper inflation that is the consequence of pumping fake money into the supply continuously then a loaf of bread could possibly cost a couple of hundred dollars or more, so at that point if that point came then there could be a chance of a single satoshi rising in value maybe not a dollar but definitely a rise but it will not make it worth anymore in reality..

I know, that wasn't what I was saying. I was just intrigued by the phrase 'a can of pop' since I've never seen that used outside the Beano. And there's nothing wrong with growing up reading it. I loved it.

What's important is to try to calculate what will be the purchasing power of 1 BTC in the next 10 or 20 years, not the parity with dollar which could indeed decrease a lot. The question is: how??

Never heard of beano. Where do you live? I live in Vancouver. It's pretty common here. A can of soda sounds weird to me, so I don't know how else you would mention "an aluminum can, usually 355ml's worth of carbonated drink such as coca cola and sprite"?