What you're saying isn't true. It would be true if the guy who borrowed from Satoshi has to pay it back in a 1-time lump sum. However, he can provide a service that slowly earns bitcoins, and pay those back to Satoshi. In turn, Satoshi spends the bitcoins he got back somewhere, and that third party spends the bitcoin buying the service from the guy who borrowed from Satoshi. Now he has enough bitcoins to pay back Satoshi in full, without any magically appearing bitcoins.

Banks aren't audited daily to make sure they have the money people deposited, and the money they are loaning out. Yet people trust banks.

Sure, many current bitcoiners cannot trust anyone, and require solid proof of everything. But if bitcoin goes mainstream, the vast majority of people won't care if bitcoin companies operates with fractional reserve. And they won't care if there are effectively 21,000,000,000 bitcoins that are $100 each instead of 21,000,000 bitcoins that are $100,000 each, because they weren't early adopters and won't get a huge return on their investment. In fact, I bet they'd prefer the first outcome, since people have this tendency to want others to fail as well if they didn't succeed themselves.

And the thing is, Chinese KNOW how to pronounce the "R" sound and "L" sound differently, because they exist as distinct sounds in Chinese. Only Japanese and Korean confuses r with L.

sounds like a pyramid scheme. He's saying that some people doing whatever (probably investing in him) is getting 4000 LTCs a day as a reward

Chances bitcoin will not die (as in, become insignificant) after 5-10 years: 80%

Chances of bitcoin's price being manipulated so that it never goes above 4 digits: 30%

Chances of bitcoin's price going above $10,000: .8 * .7 = 56%

Chances of bitcoin being a poor investment: ~30%

What happened with the other 16%? Well, bitcoin might be manipulated so that it goes up a little bit.

I don't see bitcoin stopping at $10,000 once it gets there, if it gets there. There's no reason for it to be so. If bitcoin becomes widely adopted, we will know what markets it will have disrupted. Will it be the credit card market? ecommerce? remissions? store of value? back-up against fiat currencies? Some combination of those? Whichever market it penetrates, the end result is that it should have a marketcap that will allow values far larger than $10k per coin.


That said, one very real danger, other than bitcoin fading away as a fad, is fractional reserve. Yes, "real" bitcoins cannot be made into fractional reserves. However, companies like coinbase or xapo or circle can operate on a fractional reserve, and if enough people trust these companies, it will have very real effects on the economy, because of potentially tens of millions of extra supply.

Given how many people in the world are clueless today, or choose to trust whatever large companies or governments they interact with, I think it's quite likely that potentially some large company can and will operate with fractional reserve bitcoins. We can only hope that it won't have such a large impact as I'm imagining.

And it won't change by itself. There needs to be work done to make smaller units more widely used.

Of course it can. There will be people who will trust companies like coinbase and circle and xapo that these companies will give them "real" bitcoins when they choose to withdrawl, thus they don't mind if coinbase etc actually uses fractional reserve.

If you are only going to take into account things that are completely knowable, then I advise you, quit bitcoin now. The risk is absolutely not worth it. If you don't take into account the slight possibility that there will be killer apps, and only look at how bitcoin is today, then I guarantee you, bitcoin will NEVER reach mainstream, and bitcoin will die a horrible death when miner rewards become insignificant and the system becomes easy to attack. Most people in the world already heard of bitcoin, they're not going to use it as it currently is, period.

Unless you're considering the possibility that bitcoin will be GREATLY improved, and there will be killer apps on top of bitcoin, just stop wasting your time on this. Bitcoin as it currently is cannot even come close to comparing against banks and visa and mastercard.

It's funny because you got it completely wrong. TA is only good for short term, when there are no new developments, if it's any good at all. No matter how good you are at TA, you cannot account for events in the long term that will affect the market. The longer term you're looking, the higher chance that some event will happen, whether it helps the price or harms the price. The chances will tend to 100% as the time gets longer. So to say that TA works for longer term while predictions based on reality is "baseless" is just laughable. TA is okay for day traders, that's why they use it for trading. For longer term holders, you need to take into account the potential of the investment, the developments that will probably happen in 5-10 years, or even longer, rather than to simply look at the current situation.

@the other guy: How do you know that the halving is one of the variables that have a significant influence over bitcoin's price? Do you have stats to back it up? Same thing with Greece. Most of the reputable people like Fred Wilson and Andreas don't think the current Greece situation has much affect on the price of bitcoins (It might in the future, but not yet). How can you prove that the little pump is correlated to Greece?

I don't think either event has nearly as big an impact as people are led to believe.

I don't think the killer app is the halving itself.

Think from the perspective of someone who isn't into bitcoin yet. Why would they join bitcoin because the mining rewards halved? There's no benefit to them, so they won't join. Halving won't increase demand at all. What it does is increase the stress to miners, because suddenly their rewards are halved.

Okay, maybe not "halved". Maybe the price will go up a little bit because of the halving, so they'll earn 60% of what they originally earned. That's still detrimental to any business. Plus it's possible the halving will actually DECREASE the price, because so many people like yourself is expecting that the price will increase with the halving, if it doesn't, maybe some of these people will be disappointed and start dumping.

Either way, I can't see the halving as an event that will help catapult bitcoin to the moon. In fact, I don't even think it's necessarily a good for bitcoin at this point in time.

Sure, mining rewards is the only thing that's "certain" right now. But the total affect it has on the economy is tiny.

Focusing only on mining rewards is like a guy only focusing on his own wage thinking it's representative of the world's gdp; when he gets a raise, he thinks the world gdp is going way up, and when he gets fired, he thinks the world is going through another economic depression. Then you tell him, "well, you're not the only thing that makes up the world economy", and his rebuttal is "well I don't know about how much other people earn, I only know how much I earn myself so  that's the only thing that's concrete".

It's just a bad argument.

He wanted to buy a yacht with that 50k 2035 money LOL.

The number of people on this forum who don't have a clue... If I had 1BTC for each of them I'd have enough bitcoins to retire now

Please, please, please, please, please, learn that there are tens of other factors that are much more important than the halving.

Just because something sounds too good to be true doesn't mean it won't happen. If the fundamentals are there, who knows. We could potentially see 6-digit bitcoins. But when that happens, if it ever does, it will be because of huge increase in demand through killer apps and general acceptance by the world. It will NOT be because of mining rewards being reduced.

chessnut, do you still think that at *some* point in the future, we will see lower lows than we've seen this year, before ultimately going back up?

Or do you think we've reached a floor at ~170-180?

I can see monero as a really good potential anonymous and secure store of wealth; when the marketcap of monero is in the hundreds of billions or trillions, I can see HNW and UHNW storing at least some of their wealth in monero, either because they want privacy or because they're trying to hide their assets from family/friends/government/mafia etc.

But how can we help it make that first leap? For the first UHNW guy, monero is not yet a great store of value. How can we convince him and others to store their value in monero? It's not going to happen if we just say "oh, if even one rich guy comes here we'll go to the moon".

How do we get that rich person/people to join monero? What could we do to promote it and make it more attractive to that group of people?

Also, where did americanpegasus go?

Which people are you referring to? If you're referring to me I suggest you read my explanations and rebute those points rather than ad hominem in this roundabout manner.

You guys are being too complicated. It's really not that difficult. The OP just wants $1,000,000 USD's worth from bitcoins, right? It can't be easier. Let me give you all the steps you need to achieve that.


Step 1: Start with $2,000,000 USD.

Step 2: Using that money, buy bitcoins from a shady exchange, and keep trading.

Step 3: Stop when you have $1,000,000 USD's worth of bitcoins left, then convert back to USD.

Saying it's 50/50 has NOTHING to do with it remaining constant... There is absolutely no chance it will remain constant. The demand, not the price, I mean.

This is exactly what I have beef with. Sure, mining rewards might have a slight affect on the PRICE of bitcoin. I don't know how big a variable it is, with the thousands of other factors that goes into the pricing of bitcoins, but it is a factor. That I admit.

But there is absolutely NO REASON whatsoever, that reducing mining rewards will somehow help bitcoin grow. That is completely outrageous. People won't magically begin to accept bitcoins when the rewards are lower.

Even in terms of price, the halving won't necessarily help, again, because there are so many factors involved that we just don't know how big an affect mining reward has on the whole bitcoin economy. Furthermore, much of it is already priced into bitcoins, because it is a known event, not something that suddenly comes.

If anything, mining rewards might magnify the effects of demand. If bitcoin ends up succeeding, and demand growing, then halving the mining rewards will increase the price even more.

But if demand drops, as the mining reward halves, miners will lose incentive to mine, and the network will be less secure, causing the price to fall even more, in an endless cycle.

So mining rewards act as a multiplier rather than a simple increase or decrease mechanism.

You aren't taking into account all possible scenarios, you are taking a default that the demand WON'T change, and that every other variable WILL remain constant. Which is completely silly because that's impossible. We don't know whether demand will go up or down, it's probably a 50/50. But we do know that it will NOT remain constant or near constant, that's just not possible. So to assume that as the default is silly.

Any change in demand will far out shadow the effects of mining rewards.

No. What YOU'RE not getting, is that there is money both going IN to bitcoin, and going OUT of bitcoin. For example, if everyday early adopters or people who lost faith in bitcoin after buying at the peak decide to completely exit and never come back, and sell $500,000,000 worth of bitcoins a day, and new investors are bringing in approximately $500,000,000 per day, the mining reward is hardly significant in changing the price, because it's such a small percentage of the daily change, probably a lot smaller than the daily variance.

Note that I'm not saying there is 500 million going in and out of bitcoin everyday. I'm using an extreme example to illustrate a point. We don't know how big a % of daily dumps mining rewards are. Because a previous investor exiting the bitcon economy should have the same effect as mining dumps, so what is the ratio of these things?

Again, all else being equal is normally a good way to isolate a variable, but in this case it is not realistic at all. But if it was, bitcoin would still not go up by thousands of percentage points by a few thousand btc a day, at least, it would take many, many years for that to happen. If everything were to stay absolutely constant in those years.

In the first place, we don't know how much bitcoins is being dumped everyday, at all. There's no data on this. We don't know how many miners are holding, and we don't know how many early adopters are cashing out. It is quite likely that even today, miners dumping only makes up a small fraction of the daily bitcoin transactions, making it quite insignificant. After all, there are over 10 million bitcoins, to think that a few thousand coins can change the price by thousands of percents is just silly.

Furthermore, assuming that demand stays the same is also incredibly silly. Demand will NOT stay the same. The vast majority of the demand currently is for trading and speculation. If it's shown that bitcoin does not have traction with any real world uses, then demand will fall. Furthermore, because mining rewards won't be sufficient, there will be problems with the network security, further pushing down the price.

Again, bitcoin HAS TO succeed BEFORE the mining rewards become insignificant. That's the only way for bitcoin to succeed. Otherwise, it'll die out.

The only other possibility is if some companies/banks will use the blockchain as a purely B2B database type thing, and they'll invest money to keep it secure, without caring for the actual bitcoins. In this scenario, it's possible bitcoin doesn't go to <$10 nor does it go "to the moon".

You keep having delusions about the mining supply. Why would demand be stronger just because there is less mining supply? In fact, it'll be a huge challenge at that time, because with such a low mining reward, how many miners will remain? Will they be able to keep the blockchain secure enough?

I would say that bitcoin HAS to succeed before then, in order for it to survive. If bitcoin isn't sufficiently valuable and/or there is not enough transaction volume to allow for a decent mining reward, bitcoin cannot survive, because the network will not be secure enough.

What will drive demand is some sort of a or a few killer apps using bitcoin technology, easier access to bitcoin (KYC turns off a lot of people) and a better understanding of bitcoin in the general population.

because the effect of the mining reward on the price of every bitcoin in existence is way overrated?