My point was just that people who think physical money can't go ahead because Bitcoin can't kill fiat are missing the possibility that paper money can go away without Bitcoin killing fiat. In all likelihood, no cryptocurrency will kill fiat, and it's also unlikely that paper money will completely disappear.

There is a difference between the end of paper money and the end of fiat. Paper money is just physical bills. That can go away and be replaced by electronic fiat. Most of the US money currently exists electronically now anyway.

Waiting for the price to increase after the halving doesn't make much sense. Markets are forward-looking, so by the time the halving occurs, the expected rise attributable to the halving should have already taken place. (At least, in a rational and liquid market, which bitcoin is more than it isn't.) Also consider that the price has more than doubled since last August, and perhaps the effect of the halving has already run its course. People expecting a sudden double are delusional. But we've had more than a double in less than a year, all while speculation about what the halving is supposed to do to the price grows. Perhaps the double everyone is looking for has already happened.

The price is less related to how many bitcoins are "alive" but is directly related to how many bitcoins are being traded. The thesis on the pumpers is that miners sell their coins immediately to fund the cost of mining. If mining income is halved, that decreases the amount of coins newly coming on to the market to trade, and less supply leads to higher price. I'm not agreeing with that argument, I'm just stating it, as it's more nuanced than you allowed for.

That's a pretty flimsy case for never having a bear market. Lots of things generate news. News is rather worthless, buyers are what matter. Bitcoin generates far more news, but that didn't keep it from crumbling to from $200 from $1200. Only the hype about the halving has managed to bring it back to 40% of it's high point.

I'm interested in the odds of winning the top prize. On the face of it, it would seem the odds of rolling a 10,000 would be 1 in 10,000; however due to the way the hash is converted into a five digit number, I suspect this may not actually be the case. But I am not proficient in the math to be able to understand how the hash is converted anyway, so I cannot figure it out myself. (Side note, with the number of rolls this site gets per day, if 1 in 10,000 of them were winning $200, I don't see how the site could generate enough money from ads to stay in business.)

So basically, I'm looking for the odds of rolling in each tier when taking into account the conversion from the hash to a 5 digit number.

0001 - 9885, implied odds: 98.85%; actual odds: ?
9886 - 9985, implied odds: 1.00%; actual odds: ?
9986 - 9993, implied odds: 0.08%; actual odds: ?
9994 - 9997, implied odds: 0.04%; actual odds: ?
9998 - 9999, implied odds: 0.02%; actual odds: ?
10000, implied odds: 0.01%; actual odds: ?

Are the implied odds and the actual odds the same?

From the site:


Emphasis added.

I think that converting the string to a decimal, dividing the string by 429496.7295, and rounding to the nearest whole number probably makes the odds that the result is 10,000 far less than 1 in 10,000.

Does anyone know?

I don't see LPG catching on. It's far more likely to go full electric than LPG on a large scale for consumer vehicles. For the trucking industry, LNG and CNG are making inroads, as even in the cheap oil environment, natural gas is cheaper than diesel and way cleaner on emissions. A company called Clean Energy Fuels even has a process than converts methane from landfills into fuel for the trucking industry, and the use of which has net zero emissions.

Perhaps the "21 million cap" will not be reached for technical reasons, but a cap will still be reached unless the system is changed to scrap the cap. Because of technical anomalies, the cap is slightly less than 21 million (20999999.97690000 btc), but the cap will be reached as of block 6,930,000, as that is the first block where the block reward will no longer produce a single satoshi.  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Long_Term

That is currently projected to be around year 2128, though at the current trend of evermore mining power, this estimate will continue to move up.  

No one here will be alive at that point. Bitcoin inflation is set to run well over 100 years.

Really, the "management" structure isn't all that unconventional. It requires consensus, same as any board of directors voting on proposals of a company. The way the voting is done is unconventional, sure.

On the topic of innovation, Bitcoin will absolutely be replaced if it doesn't innovate. The fact that the block size cap was not addressed since inception threatened to sink the entire system. Even the solution employed now is only a temporary fix. It will run into scaling problems again. But that's more of an infrastructure problem than an innovation problem.

Other alts have a market because they're addressing something bitcoin isn't. In the future, bitcoin may be too slow compared to alternatives. The blocks may be too small. The amount of information able to be recorded in the blockchain may be too limited. It can't handle smart contracts (not sold on this idea anyway, just floating it as an example of a potential disruption). There are a myriad of unforeseen circumstances that treaten Bitcoin's dominance in crypto. The fact that the system can't address infrastructure problems doesn't instill any confidence it can adapt to a changing marketplace.

The one thing Bitcoin is not, is flexible or nimble, just like any other market dominating entity. It's afraid to rock the boat and threaten it's current market share, which is exactly what makes it ripe to lose it.

Keep in mind that there is a better than average chance that there will be a dump after the halving at some point as people who have been buying specifically because of the halving cash out their profits. The rush to exit could cause a steep crash.

If everyone is buying because of the halving, then the halving does affect the price. That says nothing about whether people are being unreasonable for acting on the halving... What's going on is speculation, and speculation absolutely affects price.

What are you talking about? These criticisms about having no intrinsic value are exactly the same for crypto, except it's not even tangible, so it's not even worth ink and paper. And you absolutely can exchange a piece of paper for goods. It happens literally billions of times every day all over the world.

Crypto and fiat are the same in that the only reason they have value is because there are large groups of people who collectively believe that they do. They're both backed by nothing but faith that they will have value tomorrow.

This is not the same as lost coins. By "decreasing," OP means coins that are lost and not recoverable. Coins that are not in circulation are not lost.

We made it guys! We did it! All the oil problems are solved forever! Right? Right???

On a serious note, it's promising that there are some signs to indicate the surplus may start to dwindle. US inventories dropped last week 4.23 million barrels, when a drop of only 2 million was expected. However, Nigera and Venezuela are both producing less; Nigeria because of terrorist attacks, and Venezuela because it's dealing with widespread power outages.

Governments print more money, which gives it less value. I don't know fondant governments giving their currency more value. That's just not what they do.

A wallet is just a list of addresses and the associated private keys. So if you lose the key to an address, btc can still be sent to it, but never retrieved. It is in a sense "lost" forever.

I find it more appropriate to compare Bitcoin to a company and the users to customers. (We are essentially buying the "product" after all, with with fiat or through time and effort to mine it, or through trade - opportunity costs). In that lense, Bitcoin is a decent sized company (7 billion dollar market cap) with a fairly sizable customer base that seems appropriate for the market cap. It certainly has room to grow, but it could also stagnate and lose market share by losing out to competitors (alt coins) and failing to stay innovative.

But that's kinda my point. That system is just pay-to-play. Only the richest people will have any say, and their say will be amplified 1) because they have the most money, and 2) because if not everyone is voting, there aren't enough other people weighing in to lessen the impact of the rich folks. The "directors" then are by default the people with the most money.

Good god, that didn't explain anything. Just some guy saying "real world" a bunch of times and not saying anything useful or providing any examples.