The big pile of money that you collected are just some numbers banks write on their book, the original ownership of these purchasing power belongs to banks who wrote it out of nothing. The more you collect those money (by doing various work or business activity), the more they write, that is the slavery

I borrow Buffet's word: “If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.”

Same here, if you don't understand who created financial crisis and who gained from all this drama, then you are the victim of their brainwash

Those economists, they have never owned one vault of gold, and they have never issued one piece of dollar, so they definitely don't understand all the gains and losses involved in all these schemes, I'd rather believe central banker John Law's word over these observers and researchers  

If bitcoin goes to 1 million USD, what would you do?

For me, it will not be too different than now. Since I don't need extra money to improve the life quality dramatically, and I have never really understood the potentials of the bitcoins in my wallet, so it does not really matter how much they worth

Only when bitcoin can achieve something that fiat money that can never do, then bitcoin start to be more meaningful. For example it can enable you to command some transformers or space travel to another galaxy, or give you a perfect wife or an eternal life...  something like that  

More practically, if some of the top quality service is only payable in bitcoin, then bitcoin's price becomes more meaningful, higher price will give you the ability to enjoy more service that fiat money can never get. Bitcoin economy need such kind of enabler

Great, that's the purpose of this thread: I want to research, what kind of thing can be used as a standard unit of value universally?

I have thought about many different candidates like air/water/food/time/energy to use as currency, but later I found out that value is all subjective, once you get enough of the currency, their value will drop for you

So the way to make currency's value stable is to make the demand infinite, e.g. make most of the people poor, then the currency will become stable

Or the other way: To make the supply side extremely constrained, thus no matter how small the demand is, the value never drops, just like those art paints and antiques

Another consideration: It may not be important to be stable, it just need to be predictable. For example, with bitcoin as currency, a long term appreciation against other things is guaranteed due to limited supply, thus people could easily reach a consensus about this character, then it can be used as a benchmark to measure value, since everyone knows that the value of this benchmark itself increase at a predictable rate

It does not matter who controls fiat, the creation of fiat money is essentially a double spending, see this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=947040.0

If you look at most of the recession in history, first comes monetary expansion, then comes asset/stock bubble, it shifted wealth from majority of people to a few elite. And when the bubble bursts, majority of people incurred a huge loss, then the consumption of the whole society will dive, then there will be deflation

So, the damage to economy is already done when majority of people has signed their contract and sold their future for a house that should not worth that much. However, blaming the recession to deflation gives banks one more chance to rob during a price down fall, where they could print lots of money to buy those foreclosure houses at the cost of nothing

So banks not only successfully sold a cheap house expensively near asset bubble's high and they even bought it back using nothing. They drive this scheme when people are getting richer, to make sure majority of people are poor and working hard

In most of the people's mind, money is a standard unit of value. Just like using meter to measure length and using kilogram to measure weight, people use money to measure value

Based on proven economy theory, value is decided by supply and demand: More supply and less demand will decrease the value, vice versa. However, this does not apply to money: Money can be used to purchase anything, the demand for money can be regarded as infinite. When demand is close to infinite, the supply will not change its value in any significant way. So for average household, the money's value feels the same for them regardless of money supply

So there is a strange phenomenon: Banks create money to dilute the wealth of the whole society, but when average people are becoming poorer, they need banks to create more money to rob them so that they could get a little bit more income. As a result, banks create 100$ of money but give them 1$ so that they can hang on for a while

If everyone's money suddenly increase by 1000 times, then money's value will crash right away. The art to maintain money's value is to keep majority of people's demand for money at close to infinite. So increased money supply should be used to buy assets and debts, to increase average people's living cost, make sure that they never have enough money. Only through this way, the money's value will be stable

The amazing thing is: Such a system seems to be formed naturally over time. It is the demand for money that enslaved majority of human. And the more they are enslaved, they demand more money, thus make the money more valuable

Of course the money I'm talking here is fiat money

I never expected that the inflation in software development is so heavy, maybe one day I will work as a programmer again 

Foreign-held US debts are small comparing with what US hold domestically, and when Chinese government spend dollars to buy US products, it will create job and boom. And those bonds have no risk of default, US government will always borrow more USD from FED to repay them with good interest

John Law said, money is wealth. As long as you can create money at will, you can create wealth to solve any economy problem. There is a limit for how much money you can print without totally destroy the credibility of fiat money, but with modern productivity, it seems unless you print 10 times more money every month, people will always adapt and create enough products to earn those newly printed money. Unreasonably stupid but you can not do anything about it, since for each individual, fiat money is precious, and they will work hard to grab those paper

Maybe in future US merchants only accept bitcoin and large foreign US debt owners could not buy anything using USD

How do you define collapse? If a collapse mean something's USD value drops, then FED only need to print a little bit more USD to support the collapsed price and everything will be back to normal

If a collapse means a collapse of USD's value e.g. everything's price will double each month, then FED just need to sell large amount of assets and reduce the available USD in banking system, thus USD will become scarce again, and stop the price inflation

The only problem is that people might give up using USD, then what FED can do with USD will have no effect on anyone who does not use USD. But that is not going to happen in 2015

It will be many years before it is used everywhere

Unlike centralized system, everyone should take care of their own coins. If they have serious amount of coins, they can't rely on any third party including hard wallet makers (What if there is a back door? What if the wallet software is hacked? What if the key generated already exists?) So eventually they must learn all the bitcoin core mechanisms by themselves and learn how to protect their private key, that will take years  

The price stability of the foreign currency market is actually manipulated by central banks (as soon as Swiss central bank gave up the control, it moves 40% in a couple of hours). Central banks usually have large amount of foreign currency reserve to absorb the movement of exchange rate, they can manipulate the exchange rate at will. A good example is 1985 Plaza Agreement, which depreciated the USD by 50% to stimulate US economy

But for bitcoin, there is no such kind of central authority managing the exchange rate, it is purely market driven without any regulation. Any kind of rogue trader from a large hedge fund could cause large swings, it is a heaven for speculators. However, over time there will be some players with large reserve absorb the price shock created by short term speculation. And, without the ability to print more bitcoin, they can only defend the lower bound of the price, not upper bound. The only one that can put a limit on upper bound is Satoshi, if he still have access to those 2009 coins

Not one in a million understand fiat money, this one no exception  

It is a good start to make the question: What is fiat money? But then on her journey she will be confused by so many terms and theories that banks invented in past several centuries and eventually lost her way

Human race has been infected by fiat money virus and enslaved for decades, but they still feel good. Bitcoin is the cure for the disease, but people are not ready to be cured, they prefer stability and slavery over volatility and freedom

Exactly, and it is almost impossible to find something that can be used as a standard unit of value

Since value is decided by supply and demand, if you are going to create a universal standard of value, what should you do? You try to find something that is equally needed by everyone, and the supply is similar to everyone too. But once it becomes a standard of value, some of the people will try to accumulate more of it and some others will just lose their share. So eventually the value of this currency will drop for the rich and rise for the poor: A 100 dollar bill's value is totally different in the eyes of a bank and a plumber

The current system is trying to make 99% of people similarly poor, so that currency's value is similar to majority of them, thus keep the value of currency stable during the process

Gambling have been existing since human exists, it is a real demand, especially for rich people. It provides fun and excitement and a hope for a potential gain, just like any other game

As a business owner, I can tell you that my income purely depends on market demand, and that demand changes vastly during each year (up to 100%), due to competition and seasonal factors. Even a very mature business can not reach a stable state of constant income

So what FED is doing has nothing to do with my business, in fact when they print more money to shift wealth to banks, the majority of my customers will become poorer, and consume less, resulting less sales at my side

True, if banks later spend their income, we will get some boost in consumption and income, but look at what banks are buying: loads of debts and assets, they only consume a little and re-invest a lot

Exactly, using fiat money (that is created out of nothing) as unit of value is the main reason that we have waves and waves of financial trouble. But without cash, people don't even know how to measure value, since value is a very subjective thing, it changes based on supply and demand all the time. A universal standard of value never exist in reality: Even gold worth less near a gold mine

So, the banks must coin an abstract concept of "money", that fits into everyone's imagination. Since everyone need money to do trading, the demand is huge, you just need to create it based on those demand, that was what John Law discovered: Money is wealth, its value can be arbitrarily decided as long as people's trust on its value does not change

The reason that fiat money's value does not change is not because those fancy tricks banks are doing, it is because the trust to fiat money seldom changes, and the major task of banks is to maintain that trust. In fact, unless the country is extremely poor or you produce 10 times more money every month and pour them to factories to produce weapons during a war, the resilience of that trust is extremely high. FED just showed that printing 5x more money will not shake majority of people's trust in USD's value

Enterprise does not create value, value comes from the demand, and enterprise just create supply, they can't artificially create demand

When you have eaten your dinner, you don't want more food, you can eat some medicine and squeeze in even more food, but that will just create severe problem for your health

Same, when a society has finished its major job and want to have a rest, any simulation will not work, simply because people don't want to spend more. In stead of getting more houses and more cars, they might want to save more and retire earlier, it is that behavior of saving caused deflation

FED has proved that printing 5x more money will not cause any inflation, since they have all those money in their pocket. Now banks are sitting on that cash mountain, they will prove again that raising interest rate will not cause any deflation, since all the interest income goes into their pocket, and they will start to spend hard

However after this run, everyone will understand that the inflation and deflation has nothing to do with money supply, it is all an excuse of banks to make more money

Due to the fact that those early coins never moved and stored in tens of thousands of wallets, it is very likely they have lost (Satoshi never saved large amount of early experimental coins when they worth effectively nothing during 2009, but he might kept some other coins under his control during 2010)

And, considering that no one complains about continuous imbalance of fiat money ownership (central banks own every newly created fiat money, thus 100% of base money belongs to them originally), why should we care about bitcoin's small imbalance