Now that segwit is inevitable, the story can be told:
1) core naively entrusted custody of poor lil' segwit to miners
2) miners held segwit hostage demanding a hard fork to bigger blocks
3) hostage negotiator teams tried for many months to secure the release of segwit, but were unsuccessful (probably because the stated demands were not genuine; a majority miner knew segwit would ruin his profits from covert asicboost and really just wanted to delay as long as possible)
4) once the motivation behind the demands became public, the miners were looking for a face-saving backdown. A new negotiator team acceded to all demands - negotiated segwit to be activated first, then bigger blocks later via a hard fork. Miners agreed. Both sides signed an agreement to that effect.

The ethical 'problem' now: when a negotiating team accedes to demands under duress like this, is the team obliged to keep their promises?
Of course not. I hope they don't.

edit: changed 'everyone' to 'both sides' to make it clear that core was not in the agreement.

https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-batsbzx-2016-30/batsbzx201630-20.pdf

"Theoretically, in the absence of speculative trading, the price P of a
unit of a currency (in USD, say) is related to the volume V of
payments done with it (in USD/day), the time T between reuses of the
same currency unit (in days), and the number N of currency units in
circulation, by the equation P = V x T / N.
For bitcoin, in the distant future when all coins have been mined, N
would be 21 million BTC. At present, it is about 17 million BTC. Using
a generous estimate of V = 10 million USD/day for legal payments, and
T = 17 days, we get P = 10 USD/BTC."

I'm no economist, but it looks like he's put lots of opinions into this data.
The data from blockchain.info says V is more like 200,000,000usd/day
Stolfi's V is either just exchange volume or he's suggesting that only 1/20 of the bitcoin economy is 'legal'.
P=usd flow/btc flow = 200000000/(btc velocity*btc money supply) = 200000000/(1/17*17000000) = 200usd

The T=17 seems on the low side as well. I've calculated that many times and obtained values in the range 20-40 days. Another factor of 2 or so onto the price - 400usd

Restricting to legal payments reduces this, but involves an opinion (and may not even be a valid argument in the submission).

Am I on the wrong track?
Thoughts?

edit: After reading further (comments on question 6a), I see he does indicate that he believes the 'legal' payment component of the volume is 5% or so. So the 10usd price he arrives at above is the 'legal' price, w/e that means. Lol.

I hadn't seen this show; maybe others haven't either.

From the time when bitcoin was somewhere between $3-30 so maybe 2012 ...
Very entertaining, and a highish accuracy given the media  understanding at the time.

http://projectfreetvhd.net/watch/the-good-wife-season-3-episode-13/

https://medium.com/@21dotco/the-21-bitcoin-computer-now-shipping-60026faa87be

She definitely understands bitcoin and the blockchain. Seems to understand how permissioned, currencyless blockchains could be useful. All the bits necessary for financial institutions and other kinds of value transfer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clc3ZOP2zUo

err... I got nuthin

some scenarios though:
1) confidence is completely lost somehow, the price drops to near zero, the miners flee ... but this is ridiculous. It only needs one miner and a couple computers (maybe) and the stuff will live, ready to rise again. The difficulty adjusts so transactions continue, mined by a toaster (with a disk, haha) if necessary.
2) a complete, worldwide ban. This is also ridiculous. There's no way that could stop it short of shutting down ALL communication between computers.
3) complete loss of interest: hmm, maybe. That would imply something better has arrived though. Something so much better that we all move, that we are happy to lose our current coins, that miners are happy to lose their hardware investment or that these are somehow leveraged. Fine.
4) bitcoin protocol design problems, unfixable: Hard to imagine given the open source nature of the beast, the years of testing already done, the determination of people, the stakes involved now ...
5) physical disaster, all blockchain copies lost: The sun supernovas AND the universe's entropy maximizes. I won't hold my breath

If I had to put money on it, I'd guess only (3) makes any sense.

Thoughts?

edit: oh crap. wrong forum.