This argument is ridiculous... I could say, "Could the price of sand reach $1 B per grain?" and answer "yes", only because this is true for everything. The question "Could Bitcoin come to be worth $1 billion?" clearly does not intend to mean "Could USD ever fall to 0.000000001 BTC?". That is an incorrect interpretation.

Note also the question asks "Could Bitcoin come to be worth $1 billion", which implies real valuation.

Yes and no, depending on what you mean.

Here's the relevant quotation:

Stickers?

If you clear Safari's cache it probably won't work well either.

It's become clear to me that this problem is a lot harder than it first seemed. I've identified three general classes problems that plague the approaches.

• They tend to double count certain Bitcoiners (e.g. counting addresses/accounts of which one person can have many).
• They tend to omit certain Bitcoiners (e.g. those using hosted/shared wallets, those who don't trade, etc.).
• There is sometimes measurement uncertainty (e.g. counting full nodes).

I feel that there probably isn't a methodology immune to all three problems. However, if methods that suffer from only one problem can be developed, it should be possible to come up with bounds and uncertainty estimates.

I am talking about UPnP-less (or UPnP-disabled) routers that some people still hide behind, deliberately or not.


Say the node A sends something to you (B) and you relay it to C. Well, if your node wasn't leeching in the first place, A would have had room for another connection: directly to C.

How about an appeal to authority?

Please elaborate.

I should be clear on my definition of Bitcoiner:


To "actively possess" means to knowingly have a non-trivial amount of bitcoins, so long-term holders are included, but 2010 miners who have since forgotten about their holdings are not.

There are also "leech nodes" that arise from people running "full nodes" behind an archaic UPnP-less router that blocks the port... They waste all the resources a full node does while providing none of the benefit.

You misunderstand. I am not saying we should stay at home all the time, but I do believe the modern world is too travel-heavy. Our cars put a massive strain on the environment incomparable to the minute disturbances caused by telephone or Skype. Shouldn't we focus on what's important? Is physical presence such a big deal that we must compromise efficiency and environmental responsibility just to be physically present at a business meeting?

I have tried to produce estimates for the number of Bitcoiners using three means of estimation. However, these means disagree significantly. Hence I am asking fellow BitcoinTalk users for feedback.

Methodology 1: Naive Count

This method involves counting the number of users who use each popular form of wallet.

• From https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/, we learn that 7533 run full nodes.
• From https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users, we learn that there are 1600766 MyWallet users.
• From http://blog.coinbase.com/post/78016535692/a-major-coinbase-milestone-1-million-consumer-wallets, we learn there are 1000000+ consumer wallets on CoinBase.

Total: 2608299 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

• This approach counts directly instead of extrapolating from a correlated metric.

Weaknesses:

• Many smaller wallet providers are not enumerated. (Net undercoverage)
• Partial nodes are not counted. (Net undercoverage)
• The number of full nodes is a lower bound; many full nodes cannot be found and enumerated. (Net undercoverage)
• Many Bitcoiners have more than one wallet provider, so are double or even triple-counted. (Net overcoverage)
• Many accounts on wallet providers belong to former Bitcoiner users who are now disinterested or deceased. (Net overcoverage)

Methodology 2: Coinmap.org Extrapolation

This method uses http://www.just-style.com/store/samples/wrdas_samples.pdf and http://coinmap.org as sources. From the first source, there are approximately 5000 retail stores per million inhabitants (as an average of the developed world). From the second source, there are 4333 retail outlets that accept Bitcoin. A trivial calculation yields:

Total: 866600 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

• This approach successfully discounts inactive Bitcoiners, as they do not generate retail demand.

Weaknesses:

• Many stores are not listed on CoinMap. (Net undercoverage)
• Many stores listed on CoinMap are not retail outlets. (Net overcoverage)
• Many stores listed on CoinMap have since ceased to accept Bitcoin. (Net overcoverage)
• There is no evidence that the retail-to-population ratio will hold for Bitcoin. (Unknown effect)

Methodology 3: Address counting

The method employed here is simply to count the number of non-empty or non-trivial addresses. These are addresses with over 1 mBTC. http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address?atblock=300000 provides such a list, giving:

Total: 1456865 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

• This approach is relatively complete: even MyWallet and CoinBase users often have at least one non-empty address (though with shared wallets it is sometimes complicated.)

Weaknesses:

• Some shared wallets may pool addresses of clients together, making most empty. (Net undercoverage)
• Many people have more than one non-trivial address; some may have hundreds. (Net overcoverage)
• Many addresses probably hold coins whose keys have since been destroyed. (Net overcoverage)

Bitcoin actually goes up most of the time. That's how it got from $0.001 to $450.

Right now we're in a downtrend, which is why it tends downwards now. Some people can make money from fighting the market, but it takes some trading skill to do that. Going with the market is a far safer bet, though you don't want to be caught holding the bag in a bubble.

Starting posts: 2875
Bitcoin address: 1BL2ZMnFwtw4fzzZfSSRzEuoNdyd6hf5Eo

Please confirm; thanks.

PM sent.

There is an argument that all mined coins are sold: every mined coin must fulfil someone's demand, be it a buyer or the miner itself. So even miners who keep the coins are buying less than they otherwise would have—the mined coins are being sold to themselves.

This means that every mined coin either increases the supply (by sale on the market) or reduces the demand (by fulfilling the miner's own demand). So the amount of coins mined is a big deal! The question then becomes, has the market priced all this in?

Bump.

I really think that as a society, we should move goods and not people. People can be "virtually present" (e.g. Skype) and this suffices for most circumstances. It seems so wasteful to invest in moving people when we have phone lines that can do it faster and better...

Along with the planned severity list upgrade, there has been some reexamination of past thefts and some associated re-evaluations based on information not available at the time.

• Bitcoin7 released estimates of the amount it lost in 2013, which was below the previous rough estimate made by extrapolating orderbook volume, hence adjusting this theft downward in rankings.
• Bitscalper released an estimate of the amount left outstanding, which was used for the initial list. This amount was found in re-examination to significantly understate the magnitude of the theft. A new lower bound has been prepared and may be adjusted further upwards in the future. This moves Bitscalper up in the rankings; however, it remains unranked by the current criteria.

Reanalysis is taking a while so I have only done to mid-2012 so far. The list is hence updated only until that time, which also means that the new severity list is incomplete. I will prioritize completing the reanalysis so the severity list can be completed.

First ATM in Saskatchewan!

The pace of Bitcoin ATM adoption is truly amazing.