There are many projections from thousands of dollars to billions of dollars, here is a million dollars strategy
An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollars

It won't be used for daily spending unless the price volatility calms down. But that is impossible due to reward halving every 4 years: If FED cut money supply every 4 years, what would you expect on USD's value? Fiat money's value is stable because central banks constantly adjust the supply to meet the demand, but bitcoin is not working like that, supply have no flexibility like a stock, destined to be a bubble maker

So sooner or later people will focus on the investment property of bitcoin and try to get as many exchanges as possible in each country

Even if you trade foreign currencies, you still need to pay capital gain tax

The fee is based on network data usage, not the amount of bitcoin, so it will always benefit the large transactions. To hold the promise of cheap fee for small transactions, block size must be expanded

There are so many financial products and assets that you can't use to buy anything, but that does not stop you from trading them on exchanges and get some cash to spend

Bitcoin is the most abstraction form of asset that human ever invented, it does not have any physical form but it has the properties that any asset have: Exclusive ownership, the ability to satisfy certain customer demand, and generate return over time

And exchange rate was not affected by this test, showing that real economy activities have nothing to do with exchange rate, which is mainly decided at exchange

This is true for fiat money too, their exchange rate is maintained by central banks with huge amount of currency reserve, have nothing to do with real economy. In fact, banks affect economy through manipulating exchange rates

Unless they are holding some bitcoins for the long term, which is the major usage right now  

The idea behind this test is good. If a large entity can spam the network with large amount of transactions (Banks for example, could throw in million dollar without difficulty, if they feel that bitcoin is competing with their business), then the best way to defend is to raise the block size 100 times: With larger block size, to spam the network would require much more resources, and it will be much easier for miners to see the spam nodes (with huge amount of transactions) and block them

It seems the network is back to normal now, maybe OP's nodes are all blocked right now  

I don't think that is a big deal. Except for some active traders, average people are actually very flexible when it comes to transaction confirmation time. Since 90% of the bitcoins are used as long term investment, it does not really matter you bought it one day earlier or you sell it one day later

Banks are all closed during the weekend, but that does not drive all the people to 24/7 internet banks. They will patiently wait for the Monday to do business again. Even bible said that you should not work on Sunday 

True, consumers are not going to take an extra step to buy bitcoin and then make purchases. Even if they receive bitcoin as salary, they will store it and get some fiat to spend, since fiat will drop in value while bitcoin will rise in value

However, once they have some bitcoin holding, things will change. They will participate in bitcoin related activities to promote its usage and raise its value, so that their holding will become more valuable (more usage will cause a shortage of coin on the market, thus raise its value indirectly), and to make sure that they can spend their coin easily in future when their investment matures An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollars

As a fiat money user, your action have almost no influence on fiat money's value, because central bank have dominance influence. But as a bitcoin user, your action (especially a consensus reached among many participants) can affect the value of bitcoin significantly, that is a big difference. By holding and buying bitcoin to purchase things, its value will rise. You can imagine, if the major players in the space like large exchanges and mining pools all decided to tighten money supply, they will achieve basically the same result as FED's open market operation

Central banks are doing such kind of operation constantly to stabilize the value of currency. In bitcoin world, everyone is a distributed central banker. If enough people reach consensus, their action will directly affect the money supply in bitcoin monetary system: If 1 million people hold 1 coin each, then the bitcoin money supply will reduce by 10%, cause a 10% increase in currency's value. And if 1 million people spend 1 coin each, then the bitcoin money supply will increase by 10%, cause a 10% drop in value

All the guns replaced with force shields  

GT1850 fan should do the trick, almost no noise but strong airflow, but difficult to find, maybe in china

In an ideal situation, an investor bought 10 bitcoin and hold it for 10 years, then spend them, those 10 bitcoins will be picked up by the next investor, at higher exchange rate. So, a constant inflow of new investor is enough to keep the balance. There are 370K new baby born every day, there will always be plenty of new investors. The whole system is quite self-sustainable

However in real world, every time a speculative bubble hits, it will dramatically increase the amount of people that invest in bitcoin. Quickly raised price will make many investors reach their target earlier, thus cause large scale of spending, and burst the bubble. After bubble burst, the amount of new investors will drop quickly, cause the coin price to dive. This whole bubble process will distort the long term price development trend, thus in some degree hurt the anti-inflation character of bitcoin: It is not easy to see the anti-inflation effect if you don't hold it for more than 4 years

And even worse, if one day a bubble is large enough to attract more than 50% of the existing population to invest, then you might never find enough population to absorb the sell pressure when those people have reached their target. The burst of such a large bubble might end up broke the promise of anti-inflation. E.g. bitcoin exchange rate makes a lower low after 4 years. Of course we are still far from it, but worth noting. And by that time, people might not need to sell bitcoin on exchanges, they just spend them, maybe the crash can be avoided

Why not core upgrade? XT sounds very altcoin

Nothing can double every 2 years forever, basically the amount of RAM has almost no increase for past 5 years in latest computers, and the average home network bandwidth just stayed at 100MB for several years already

Bitcoin isn't worth it for people who don't have bitcoin. But if people have some bitcoin, things will be different

People do not become bitcoin consumers over night. They typically first purchase bitcoin, then hold it for years, and then when their bitcoin have raised in value multiple times, they become the bitcoin consumer  

Vote is not good, should strive to reach 100% consensus, and that can be done step by step

You never vote for the answer of 1+1, it will always be 2 no matter what you vote. You don't need vote if a fact is understandable for everyone. The reason why people need a vote is typically because no one can clearly understand what is the consequence of certain decision

I think currently almost everyone have a consensus that block size limit will be raised

First and most important, Satoshi set this limit temporarily, he also suggested the way to raise the block size limit when the time comes. As the creator of bitcoin, his opinion should be highly respected

And from end user point of view, if the system is not able to handle enough amount of transactions, then the payment network will only be able to handle large transactions (Who can afford a very high fee), all the small transactions will be dropped, people have to rely on off-chain solutions which lacks many of bitcoin transaction's superior property, this is not a simple and robust enough solution

So the only difference is that how large the new limit should be, or how fast it should be raised. I think it is easy to reach a consensus of conservative approach when facing uncertainty (If you did not change too dramatically from the current status, you will be very likely to handle the incident if there is any)

A rule of thumb when it comes to IT infrastructure upgrade, you always start to plan an upgrade when 3/4 of the capacity is reaching, and the load should drop below 25% of the capacity of the new infrastructure, means a 3x increase in capacity when upgrading

They should first acquire enough bitcoin then start to do this, or ask some early adopter to donate half of the stash, 100K coins at least  

In my experience, most of the bitcoin purchases are for investment purpose. Bitcoin also has the payment function, that is a plus, so in future when your investment matured you can spend it easily

Every day some of the early investors are realizing their gains, they need to sell bitcoin or spend bitcoin, those demands are driving the exchange service and merchant adoption

There are some businesses exclusively use bitcoin as payment method, but many of those are typically running underground or in grey area of the law, mostly violate AML/KYC rules, they are creating negative public image of bitcoin, but scale are small comparing with the investment usage of bitcoin. International remittance could also be a powerful usage, but the scale is also small

Some other debate about artificial scarcity

1. There are many financial products with limited supply, for example stocks, why bitcoin?

There are also speculative bubbles for stock, but those financial products are all issued by some entity, and can only be traded on certain exchange, means the owner doesn't really have the full control of his asset. This greatly reduced the ability to liquidate the asset anywhere anytime. If you want some asset that you have 100% control, bitcoin is a better choice. If you consider bitcoin as a company's stock, its company structure and profit model is very transparent



2. There are many altcoins with limited supply, why bitcoin?

Bitcoin is essentially a consensus: People invest in a crypto currency with limited supply to protect their wealth from inflation and get some potential gain in future. So, from investor point of view, to maximize the chance of success, he would invest in one most adopted crypto currency

The success of the investment is dependant on most of the investor's consensus: If everyone decided to adopt different coins, then everyone's investment will fail, due to more and more alt-coins, thus crypto currency inflation. Crypto currency inflation will destroy their most attractive feature (anti-inflation), and make them impossible to sell to future investors

At a higher abstraction level, all the investments are to give some return for invested capital. In order to do this, the invested project should produce something that satisfy certain kind of customer demand, and the production cost should be lower than the price paid by customer, to ensure the investment will get some positive return

From this view, investment in bitcoin is because bitcoin can satisfy customer's long term saving and anti-inflation demand. And the cost now (measured by fiat money) will be lower than the price paid by future customer

Actually, investors don't really produce this service, the anti-inflation feature is already built-in for bitcoin. However, if you don't inject your capital into a company, the company would never produce anything, no matter how profitable it can be. Similarly, without people's investment in bitcoin, bitcoin's anti-inflation ability will not be shown clearly

So, all the capital invested into bitcoin through mining or purchasing will directly or indirectly raise its cost and price, a rising cost/price will further strengthen its anti-inflation promise, give people more confidence to further invest

Money thrown into a company might produce products at much higher cost than price, then cause bankrupt. But money invested in bitcoin will all drive up its cost/price, contributing to its long term anti-inflation promise, which is the ultimate feature that customers seek

For example, many people bought above $500, but their purchase reduced the sell pressure and kept the price high for a while, so that more mining investment followed and eventually pushed bitcoin's cost/price to a much higher level than last bottom


This is not Ponzi or pyramid scheme, because even the user base does not increase at all, e.g. every month, same amount of people enter and leave, thus the monthly investment capital never increase, it would still defeat inflation after 4 years due to reward halving

This decentralized consensus is building up quickly. Once the consensus is widely spread, everyone will invest in bitcoin at a well defined pace: periodically buy and hold, cash out late and small, thus make it a top anti-inflation product

Unlike bitcoin, most of the other things in the world do not have continuously shrinking supply and total limit, they can not give the same promise (Land maybe similar but the supply of habitable land is continuously increasing)


Some people might question the validity of the artificial scarcity, because it is man-made. But does it really matter if it is man-made (bitcoin) or nature-made (gold)? As long as the scarcity is impossible to change, it is enough

The fear maybe comes from the fact that artificial scarcity can be changed if the protocol is changed. But then the general consensus of the participants will make sure that will never happen, protocol change of the scarcity rule will be discarded by almost every participants

Bitcoin's history is short, that's the reason bitcoin is still a risky investment. But anything has two sides: Maybe after another 10 years you have much less risk with bitcoin due to more regulation clarity and mass adoption, but then you will also have reduced return, and even worse, the reduced risk/reward ratio

In 2010, you can get one bitcoin at a couple of cents, no one think it is a serious investment since there are just so many uncertainties that can kill this experiment, but that's the time it has the most risk/reward potential

In 2015, you can get one bitcoin with 220 dollar, still not so many think it is a serious investment, but it has gained some support in financial branch, the uncertainties are dropping, and the potential future return has also dropped

It is only when you don't know what will happen in future, you can expect a huge return (and risk)