Bitcoin Forum

In 12 years most of the bitcoin supply will already be mined. 20 million coins mined, the remaining BTC will be the one that goes slowly released through the rest of the 140 year period.

In practice, more than 1 million coins will be lost. This puts the 21 BTC holders in less than 1 million person on the entire planet.

This MUST mean that holders of 21 BTC are at least $millionaires. Otherwise BTC would have been a failure as a store of value (this is irrelevant to the scaling debate).

That would make each Bitcoin worth around $47,600 in 12 years. That sounds high, but anything is possible. I also think there will be a large number of Bitcoins permanently lost due to lost private keys, forgotten coins, death of the owner, etc. Once they are lost, they can never be recovered, so the number of lost Bitcoins will continue to rise. This will make Bitcoins even more scarce.

there already are confirmed lost coins in the thousands, at least, not counting satoshi's million or so.

When we get 5 digit soon, nobody would have doubts about $50000 price  ::)

I like to dream. Instead of throwing around random numbers let's talk about how much adoption and demand would be required to drive the price from its current $1,200 to $47,000 per coin.

What kind of shifts in behavior and mindset are needed?

How can each of us do something to get us there...small actions now could have huge effects in 12 years. If each of us convinced 10 people to buy some bitcoin and each of those people convinced 10 people to buy some bitcoin, the growth becomes exponential.

12 years is not really a long time and with the estimates I am seeing, the price would seem to be overvalued by then. Unless issues are resolved in those years, scaling, hard fork, unconfirmed transactions, we might be stuck at below $2000 for a while. After a strong start to the year, bitcoin has been somewhat on an up and down ride with the $1200 resistance still a barrier to be broken convincingly.

the 21 bitcoin has always been a nice number (at least for me) despite the fact that many already have a lot more than that. like the whales and those who had enough faith in bitcoin to invest in it for long term in the days of super low price and keep holding it. they have hundreds if not more bitcoins.

p.s. something tells me the 12 years is not a right number.

In theory it looks possible but you never know what the next invention will be and maybe it outclasses bitcoin or any other present crypto currency and becomes the only choice for a digital currency and then, these bitcoin will not be worth as much.

12 years? Too much, in my opinion..

Look around you and you will notice that things are worse than you might have thought. We don't even know what is about to happen tomorrow.

All I know is that things are getting worse, and this happens pretty much every day.. we're just distracted by different things, and therefore we cannot see the regress of our community as a whole. And as soon as things get bad, people are looking for a good place for refuge - that's the moment people are finding the great advantages of Gold, Silver, Cryptocurrencies.

I am looking forward to a fourth of the price you're speaking about. And this price might be seen.. this year. After everything happening around the world, I really do believe this will happen this year.

This is the great thing about Bitcoin. Other commodities like gold for instance is based on scarcity, but new gold deposits are found literally every other year. Bitcoin only have 21 000 000 bitcoins and more and more are lost every day, making it even more scarce.

In the end, only a small percentage of those 21 bitcoin hoarders will still exist, because most of them will be very tempted to sell at 4 figure Bitcoin prices. ^hmmmmm^

Right now as mentioned holding 21 bitcoin is something a big number for a common man, but the growth it is expected to provide is simply big. Possibly I try hard to have at least 21 bitcoin into my wallet to be one within the one million community.

you don't need 12 years in 4 more years we are already near 19M mined, and in another 4 years you are there around 20M, at that point all the bitcoin dumped would be not from miners anymore

there should be already a very strong buy supoort, because if not, we have a problem, i would go ahead and think that the value will get a zero added for each new halving, $10k in 2020 and $100k in 2024

after that will stabilize between $100k and above, this if everything go right

i have found out that it is best to not think about how much bitcoin you need to be worth X amount and things like that.
in my opinion when you ivnest in bitcoin you should invest what you can, whether it is buying 0.01BTC or 21 bitcoin. as long as you buy something with some money you don't need and can let it stay there for a long term. the real value of bitcoin is always shown in long term. we can see it go up from 450 to 1000 and before that from 200 to 450 in 1 year. and so on.

I can't imagine the figures but as long as bitcoin will be sucessful I think we will be reach if we start saving now.
It's good that the supply is limited so we can take advantage on the increasing demand, I am not good in match  but simple
analysis tells me that I will be reach if I start start saving now.

Ok, I'll try this one.. All it would take is a failure of the Euro.. the US$ to get into trouble and the 10 TRN bond market to have a few hiccups and hell, you're there.

These things havce been predicted to happen for ages now.. i think withing the next 12 years there is a high chance of ALL of them happening.

At this point you are in the top 5% of the world. That is my estimate as to how many people even know about bitcoin, nevemind owning some.
When bad things happen to our traditional currencies, there will be a stampede to find other assets. Bitcoin is one such asset.

I think as well that the real potential of bitcoin lies in the big number of people who have no idea about it or do not use it yet.
And it does not even matter how much one of those is willing to invest.
It would only take a few percent of the world population who use bitcoin from time to time to reach a price level we could never even dream about.

Do you really think so? I hope these figures become a reality, I'll be a very happy man even if I see $10,000 per bitcoin. 

Wont work that way. Btc needs to be pumped to attract new bitcoiners because of FOMO. Now lots of people still think its a scam lol. Only money can drag them in.

Indeed. A 1000$ bitcoin, after the 2013 bubble, seemed unachievable to many. Today those 1000$ bitcoins are considered cheap.

It is all a matter of perspective. The more Bitcoin is considered to be a store of value, to more valuable it gets.
21 bitcoins is a nice amount to have, and already hard to get for many even today ($25k).

I hope you're right that at the year 2024 the price per Bitcoin could be $100,000. A lot of us are going to be wealthy if that's the case. I need to start hoarding more.

Actually, the lost Bitcoin thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0) suggests that there are under 200,000 lost Bitcoin currently.  It seems unlikely that so much Bitcoin will be lost, especially since raising the price will mean that people will own less on average and take more care since it's worth more.

That's already the case, but obviously the majority of people won't have that exact number.  Seems pretty random, you're just taking an arbitrary number (a million) and finding how much Bitcoin could be held by each person.

1000000 / 21 = 47619.047619.  So that's what you expect the price to be by then.  It could happen, I suppose, but it's really irrelevant to holders of 21 Bitcoin.  It looks like you're just doing random calculations and seeing how they turn out.

I think the lost Bitcoins could be way underestimated. That topic just lists the Bitcoins people know are lost but there have to be many lost Bitcoins that no one knows about when someone dies or forgets about them. Also people leave dust in their wallets or lose the private keys.

actually 200,000 coins isn't even that much that is just 0.9% of total supply!
there will be a lot more lost coins and it really doesn't matter since that much is not affecting the total supply compared to how many are using bitcoin.

and remember that 1 bitcoin is equal to 100000000 satoshi.

IT doesn't necessarily mean that it MUST happen, but it possibly could happen.

Because theoretically, once the money supply expands, inflation occurs.

That does not necessarily happen that fast though, there is a process.

The wages might be sticky, the contracts my be sticky, etc.

But I think ify ou have 21 BTC right now you'd be quite rich in 10 or 20 years time, that's for sure.

I've never been someone to understand how someone thinks bitcoin can ever hit this mark, like at any point let alone in 12 years. This is going to mean that people feel that Bitcoin is so valuable that they'd offering 47000 to buy 1 btc, which means that something drastically changed through time that I was and am unable to see.

It's pretty crazy to even be able to think this and it's something that isn't just going to happen at all, all these too the moon kiddos will be sad to see is that if they want Bitcoin to be adopted to a massive scale the price is going to need to stay and level out at some point. I think this range is perfectly fine.

i believe the opposite!
the more bitcoin is considered to be a store of value the less people it will attract and the price will be capped at some point soon.
bitcoin has always supposed to be a peer to peer digital cash not something some rich people buy and hodl only to gain value and never use.

i also like to believe that most of the current value of bitcoin and all the value that bitcoin will possibly have in the future comes from the fact that it is a decentralized a peer to peer digital cash.

Bitcoin can be used as cash and a long term store of value. And many other things.

Bitcoin will slowly get into deflationary territory while the USD will not. Be patient.

Basically bitcoin was not created for store of value. It is a byproduct, we are using bitcoin as an investment instrument/store of value only for time being, not as per conceptual basis of bitcoins.

Hence I believe it will be completely irrelevant if you will be measuring the success of bitcoin based on its price levels.

Bitcoin is being considered as a store of value due to its limited supply which was incorporated by Satoshi just to make people attracted for getting into and using bitcoins. Over time bitcoin will be getting stable value and it will lose its position of being used as store of value, but I'm sure it will take at least 200 years time.

Sorry, rickadone.. but that's all wrong.

I know that Satoshi was well aware of the Austrian ecconomic principles of 'sound money'.

The limited supply is a key component of that. - This means it's 'scarce', which leads to it being a good store of value.

If that ever changes.. i.e. if the fixed limit ever increases.. it becomes useless as a store of value. (inflation)

Not usable as a SOV for 200 years? Please.. many people use it today for this reason. (I have being using it to save in)

I stored €880 of VALUE in bitcoin in mid 2013.. it has GAINED in value now to be worth some €11,500

.. i'll say that is a GREAT store of value that I am using right now. Not 200 years into the future.

In fact as long as the price of 1 bitcoin does not drop below €88 - then my value will have been well stored.
Ergo. It is currently a store of value.
Try getting anything like that from a bank or another asset class. (That is under 4 years btw)

Scarcity and popularity of bitcoins will lead to the rise of price in bitcoins.if the price of bitcoins goes on increasing it may happen that the it will reach 10000$ by the end of 2018. well some people will say that here the price of bitcoins is overvalued ,but let me tell you one thing that if the price of bitcoins reach 2000$ by the 1 st week of september this year and 3000$ by the end of this year,it is likely to happen that the price of bitcoins may shoot upto 100k $ by 2024 when 20 million bitcoins will be mined.

There are way more than 200,000 lost BTC. For starters, you aren't counting in satoshi's stacks which in practice could be considered lost. There's no way in hell that satoshi isn't either dead, or lost access to his coins. He would have at least allocated some of his coins, im not even talking about selling, just MOVING some.

Those coins have been all frozen. So with those alleged 200,000 lost coins + satoshi's stack, I guesstimate we are already at over 1 million coins which are essentially inaccessible for life.

This rate of coins will infinitely go up overtime, counteracting the inflation curve.

I don’t know if 21 BTC will be enough to be a millionaire, but without a doubt it would be a good start especially if you don’t touch those coins for a long time, and the best thing is you could make even more money by trading or investing those coins.

Not bad. The point is whether Bitcoin won't be a failure (and hence it will be a success).
Even if this does happen, people with 21 BTC should hold it for the next 12 years. Resisting the temptation to sell when you have huge paper profits is tough.

In order to avoid the temptation to sell before the time frame you have specified a good measure could be to put your bitcoin in a paper wallet and keep it on a safe and that way you will not be tempted to sell at every opportunity there is a rise on price.

I think these calculations are too one dimensional.
12 years is hell long time, can you return back to 2005 and remember there were no iphones, tablets, vr devices, finger touch ui etc.
just wait and see. I feel like btc will reach those prices much earlier or will die already before 12 years.

It's possible but bitcoin has had such a huge increase since it began that it's hard to believe that it will keep growing at that pace for 12 more years.

I agree, people are just getting some sample story about deflation of Bitcoin then fires up with wild speculation of numbers. Even though Bitcoin is inclined to price increase, we know that it is not easy.  There is always resistance upon going up, we should not take  this factor out of the equation.  and besides 12 years is not that long, remeber it took more than  7 years to get the price of Bitcoin to get this high.  So probably it will take longer than 12 years to reach $47k  Bitcoin per piece.