Maybe these have already been addressed, but here they are.
1) Early adopters may have stashes of millions of bitcoin. If widely adopted a few super rich could have a huge influence over the whole bitcoin economy. Imagine owning 5% of all USD in circulation(with no fed to inflate).
There's only 11.2 million BTC that have been mined to date so it stands to reason that it's not possible for adopters (plural) to have "stashes of millions of bitcoin." Millions of dollars in Bitcoin, but not millions of Bitcoin. Also, the blockchain is public ledger so you can see which addresses hold the most amount of coins. Granted, an early adopter may own numerous "whale" addresses, but I think if you look them over, you'll still see it's not possible that a small handful of people are holding millions of coin.
2) The supply is fixed at 21 million, but bitcoins themselves are not permanent. People die all the time without wills. People die with btc on a computer/flashdrive that no one knows about, they're gone. People don't make backups, their computer crashes, they're gone. You might think this is great, because now your btc are more valuable. But for a currency, it's not such a good thing, to have the supply eroding over time. Theoreticly, the amount of btc could eventually go to zero.
Theoretically supply can go to zero but not practically. Remember that Bitcoin is currently divisible to the 8th decimal (and this can be increased) so you shouldn't look at it as 21 million and no more. The supply is fixed, this is true, but since you can divide each "coin" into fractional amounts, there's enough to service the world's needs if needed.
3) Speed of transactions. If btc becomes very widely adopted, can it handle billions of transactions a day without speed becoming an issue?
Don't get me wrong. I love bitcoin and the whole concept behind it. These are just questions of someone looking to learn more.
I think this is and will continue to be an evolving process as we are currently seeing with "dust" transactions. Wider adoption means more miners and a stronger network so I think you need to account for the increase in network and infrastructure that would arise only in a mass adoption scenario.
+1
Andy B
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