Just a thought, I noticed that we have the 'Beginners & Help' section is in the 'Other' category. I feel as though new users might post more often in the Beginner board if it were in the 'Bitcoin' Category.

Previously we had the Newbie Jail requirement which forced people into this board for a 'bit', and because of this they knew of its existence. Now it seems like more of these questions end up on other boards: General Discussion, Economics, Development etc. Perhaps because the Beginners forum is not closer to the top?

My Internet was out for a few days a couple of weeks ago, during this time I was catching up on some reading. After a 'bit' I got to thinking about Bitcoin and a few ratios I think are important, primarily these are thoughts on the Availability/Scarcity of the current mined Bitcoin per Users in the network. Here are a few thoughts I wanted to share with the community, I make a number of blanket assumptions and I don't have an official background in Economics, I am not even sure if this is the right area for this post, so take what I say with a grain of salt

Given we have ~14,000,000 BTC Mined and Spendable currently
Given we have an estimated number of users of ~2,000,000 (Inflated Slightly from the recent Juniper Networks Study which estimated 1.5 Million Unique Users of Bitcoin, I bumped it to 2 million to make things rounder and in case we have grown a bit since then)

That gives us a ratio of ~7BTC/1 User in the network. Currently I think their exists an abundance of Bitcoin due to the fact that not every user in the network will buy 7 or more coins, I understand the fact that many users in the network own much more or much less than this number, but let us temporarily ignore this fact and just make assumptions for the sake of round numbers. I don't think every-time a Block is solved (25 BTC), ~every 7 new Bitcoins Minted into the economy a single user in the network is investing upwards of 1162-2100 USD or more based on the current price into Bitcoin, so every-time a block is solved we need more than ~3 new Users to eventually purchase these newly minted coins.

If we assume a few gross distribution ratios just for sake of gathering more numbers, in the United States 2011 (I believe):
1% of the Population owned ~34.6% of all the wealth in the United States

We can describe the above ratio we arrived on previously as - 700BTC/100 USERS

So 1 User out of 100 would ~ own 700BTC*.346 of the BTC available = ~242.2BTC, which leaves the the other 457.8BTC/99 Users

So even if a small percent of the networks users own a disproportionate amount of the Bitcoin, their are still ~4.5BTC/1 User which I think is still too much of an investment for every user in the network to make.

I think that until this Available Bitcoin to User Ratio gets closer to 1BTC/1 User or even flips to 1BTC/2 Users or lower than this, things in Bitcoin land will get much more interesting. So we need our user-base too grow roughly 7 to 14 times the number of Users to 14 Million or 28 Million Users or more. In regards to a time-span that a shift like this could occur with a globally adaptable technology, it took a network like Facebook to grow from single digit million number of Users to ~100 million Users in ~1 years time-span.

If anyone wants more stuff, I wrote some Python code to calculate the all of the categories in the 2011 US Distribution model (Not just the top 1%) and I did this for a Champagne model (20% own 82%), I also looked at other variations like nearly 21 Million BTC available and things like Multiple Billions of users as well. Let me know and I can collate the info/post the scripts.

TLDR; The more users we get makes our ability to purchase a single coin much more scarce. Eventually we will have more users than the number of Bitcoin available, a shift like this can take 1 years time once a few million users vested and actively using the technology.

Cheers,
juju

This seems like a really cool project wanted to share it with the forums. What do you guys think of it?

Repository:
https://github.com/openname/blockstore

Description:

Blockstore is a generic key-value store on Bitcoin. You can use it register globally unique names, associate data with those names, and transfer them between Bitcoin addresses.

Then, you or anyone can perform lookups on those names and securely obtain the data associated with them.

Blockstore uses the Bitcoin blockchain for storing name operations and data hashes, and the Kademlia distributed hash table for storing the full data files.

Design:
https://github.com/openname/blockstore/blob/master/doc/design.md

Usage:
https://github.com/openname/blockstore/blob/master/doc/usage.md

I did-int even mention the best part of it, the library is written in a good language (Python) and not something wonky/unreadable like Javascript.

Actual URL to IAmA - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jw5pm/im_gavin_andresen_chief_scientist_at_the_bitcoin/

Gavin answered some questions earlier today on Reddit, I wanted too share this with anyone who might be interested.

Coindesk Writeup: http://www.coindesk.com/12-answers-gavin-andresen-reddit-ama/

CCN Article I read about before the IAmA took place: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/join-gavin-andresen-chief-scientist-bitcoin-foundation-reddit-ama-today/

Edit: Typo, Added knight22's Coindesk URL

Hi All,

Earlier tonight I was doing some research/studying for a discussion tomorrow, I kind of got off on a tangent and got too reading about the Generals Problem etc.

One of my queries tonight lead me to this page: https://bitcointalk.org/oldSiteFiles/byzantine.html

Looking through the oldSiteFiles directory their are some cool pictures of the early client and an early Bitcoin logo.

https://bitcointalk.org/oldSiteFiles/

I found one of an early Bitcoin client that I had not seen before, a client running with only 213 blocks and 3 connections! Not many people mining back then (I haven't yet looked up any of the addresses in the screenshots)

In the off-chance others have not seen any of these screen captures or read the description of the Byzantine problem it might be worth taking a look.

If these are pretty commonly known sources please ignore the thread/let it die.

Edit: Might be some content from bitcoin.org, that html page redirects back to it as Home

Just noticed a new Article was posted by Coinbase, they are adding an optional "more user-friendly" display of BTC Unit

We’ve just launched the ability to display bitcoin in “bits” - the smaller, more user-friendly version of bitcoin’s full BTC unit.
Since the dawn of time, a single Bitcoin has been divided into 8 decimal places - into 100,000,000 “Satoshis”. This means that one Satoshi is worth exactly 0.00000001 BTC - not exactly an easy number to deal with.
Recently, a proposal came up to move to “bits”. One bit (or µBTC) is worth 100 satoshis, which means that prices can easily be displayed using two decimal places, as most people are already used to. Another advantage is that bits can be easier to say and understand - for example, $1 USD is currently worth about 0.0017 BTC, or 1,700 bits.

If you want to enable this option on your Coinbase account, simply head over to your Settings page, and change the “Bitcoin units” option to BIT.

Source: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/89405189782/its-bits

I wonder if they will impose this as the default Unit for new Accounts and if this will be a default Unit for Purchasing on a merchants page who uses Coinbase.