[CHART] Bitcoin Inflation vs. Time

[whitslack]

. . . it would be rare for a human to have more than one Blockchain.info wallet account.

Really?  I think I've got 5 of them at the moment.

I said rare, not unheard of. My assertion is that you are an outlier.

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[DannyHamilton]

. . . it would be rare for a human to have more than one Blockchain.info wallet account.

Really?  I think I've got 5 of them at the moment.

I said rare, not unheard of. My assertion is that you are an outlier.

I understand what you said and what your assertion is.  You may very well be right, but my assertion is that you are not.

While I wouldn't be surprised to find that the majority of users have only ever created one blockchain.info account, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a significantly sized minority (far more than I would call "rare") have created more than one blockchain.info for various reasons (trying it out, abandoning old empty accounts, forgotten passwords, etc).

[whitslack]

While I wouldn't be surprised to find that the majority of users have only ever created one blockchain.info account, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a significantly sized minority (far more than I would call "rare") have created more than one blockchain.info for various reasons (trying it out, abandoning old empty accounts, forgotten passwords, etc).

Even so, would you agree that the mean number of wallets per human user is very likely less than 2 and that the ratio of wallets to humans won't vary much over time? The core point is that the number of Blockchain Wallet accounts is a good estimator of (that is, it is linearly proportional to) the number of Bitcoin users. Can you think of any other metric that would be better correlated?

[robamichael]

Obviously we aren't talking about something that is exact, but the number of transactions, on average, certainly does tell us something about the economy.

I bet you that they are rising. If they were not, this would very much surprise me, and prove you correct. But I bet they are rising, because the economy is growing - and increased transactions, on average, is a sign of this.

But maybe we need to agree to disagree. However, that you think a 90% drop in transactions warrants no investigation is quite puzzling.

[whitslack]

Obviously we aren't talking about something that is exact, but the number of transactions, on average, certainly does tell us something about the economy.

Yes, it does tell us something. But you can't jump to any conclusions.

that you think a 90% drop in transactions warrants no investigation is quite puzzling.

I didn't say a dramatic drop in transactions would warrant no investigation. It definitely would. But the conclusion of that investigation might be something like "SatoshiDice has gone offline" or "Coinbase-to-Coinbase transactions are now being settled in-house." It wouldn't necessarily be related to the number of Bitcoin users or the amount of business being conducted in the Bitcoin economy or the value of the currency.

[robamichael]

Right and if Satoshidice went offline and this resulted in a 90% drop in the transaction rate.... I would say this certainly speaks a lot for the focus of the Bitcoin economy.

As the number of users increases, the transaction rate will stabilize - the average transaction rate per user will become predictable as the individual uses of bitcoin are less prone to outliers.

Transaction is the same as velocity. Though it might mean very little on an individual basis, if two people trade dollars without motive, on the aggregate, velocity means a lot to the economy.

[constitution]

Great chart, thanks

[b3b456de]

We are looking forward to 2030+ for "no inflation"...  

Won't there still be inflation due to coin loss?  Or there being limited supply, and people wanting to get in?

Also, Great chart(s).

[robamichael]

We are looking forward to 2030+ for "no inflation"...  

Won't there still be inflation due to coin loss?  Or there being limited supply, and people wanting to get in?

Also, Great chart(s).

Not inflation, but deflation.

Prices are a subject to supply and demand schedules, and may experience either inflation or deflation.

[darkmethod]

Thanks. Very helpful. Well done.

[yucca]

Eventually that little line on your graph will level out. Once all BTC are mined and in the hands of bearers, inflation will be impossible because the amount of BTC is FINITE!

Exactly.

Inflation (total coin# over time) was only written into bitcoin to attract miners in order to establish the network. If the network infrastructure were already in place then bitcoin could have been seeded with 21M coins along with the genesis block and inflation could be zero from T0.

Of course to establish this network prior to genesis block would have required tremendous capital into an unknown system. A self growing system is far sweeter. Inflation of coin was written in mainly for this reason.

Bitcoin in many ways is a computer virus that pervades beyond software, beyond hardware and into wetware (brains). It is a very good symbiotic virus that will increase our happiness. It is a glimpse of the singularity, the "perfect" system.

[bubblesort]

It might be an interesting project to try to figure out price inflation.  I mean, if we did something like the CPI of bitcoin, what would that look like?

The CPI comes from a basket of goods that is supposed to represent things that most people buy to sustain a certain standard of living.  Would it be possible to do that with bitcoins?  To begin with, you would have to describe what the standard of living is.

As far as I know, I can't buy groceries or make mortgage or car payments directly with bitcoin.  I can pay for my VPN service with it, and I can buy video games and all kinds of digital goods.  I don't think I can pay for the actual internet connection I need to work with bitcoins, though.  I mean, if I look down the list of places that use bitcoin on the wiki I see that I can buy food and things like that if I really want to, but I'm not going to buy fresh eggs and milk online.

Maybe, rather than looking at what you need to sustain a standard of living we should look at what most people buy with bitcoins and turn that into a basket.  I'm not sure how you would get that kind of metric, given the nature of how people seem to use bitcoin.

Anyway, thanks for the chart, Whitslack!

[Jobe7]

Interesting,

By your calculations, 2030 could possibly be the year that bitcoin will be 100% the dominant currency, fiat will be completely obsolete, hopefully used as toilet paper. This would also be the point where those initial single 1 bitcoin pieces will be worth a small fortune.

[whitslack]

By your calculations, 2030 could possibly be the year that […] fiat will be completely obsolete, hopefully used as toilet paper.

I wouldn't want to wipe my ass with paper currency. That wouldn't be sanitary.

[tynt]

Is there or is it possible to add "actual inflation" on that chart so we can see how well our inflation control has worked so far.

[whitslack]

Is there or is it possible to add "actual inflation" on that chart so we can see how well our inflation control has worked so far.

The actual number of bitcoins in existence at this moment is 10.935 million. The theoretical number of bitcoins that would exist now, if the blocks found to date had been found at an average interval of one every 10 minutes, would be 10.789 million. The actual number is slightly higher because we've been finding blocks faster than one every 10 minutes. Note that there will still only ever be 21 million bitcoins created; we'll just finish generating the currency a little bit ahead of schedule.

[yocko06]

Nice looks good to me.

[alcibiades]

Hi,

This graph is very useful. I would like to make similar graphs to explain how changing parameters in bitcoin would effect the bitcoin economy. Could you explain how you made that?


Thanks,
Jacob

[whitslack]

This graph is very useful. I would like to make similar graphs to explain how changing parameters in bitcoin would effect the bitcoin economy. Could you explain how you made that?

To make this chart, I made a spreadsheet of the money supply and annualized rate of inflation in every week and then turned them into a chart. The only small trick I had to do was to duplicate the rows at the transition points so that the steps on the chart would be vertical.

[DannyHamilton]

First off, it's a chart, not a graph.
- snip -

I disagree.

Merriam Webster disagrees as well:

graph:
(noun) \ˈgraf\
- A diagram (as a series of one or more points, lines, line segments, curves, or areas) that represents the variation of a variable in comparison with that of one or more other variables

What you have provided is clearly a diagram as a series of line segments that represents the variation of a variable (bitcoin currency) in comparison with that of one more variable (time).