.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

If these projects come to fruition, which is likely to happen within 2 years time frame, the accessibility of Bitcoin investments to general public will be ubiquitous.

I cannot really put a number on that.

Then this whole topic is useless. Why did you even start it ?

For me "the accessibility of Bitcoin investments to general public will be ubiquitous" is worth more like 5-10 billion USD than 500 million USD.

Unless you are talking about some stupid startup that plans to create a non-fractional reserve bank, investment fund or FOREX-like market. That may be worth 100-500 million when it starts.

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[Come-from-Beyond]

Regarding how big is BIG in Bitcoin. There is Vladimir's Axiom that I have published some long time ago.

"No entity with market cap larger than that of Bitcoin shall adopt it "

If that is true, then really really BIG for Bitcoin is something around half a Billion. This kind of excludes all the nation states. Cyprus, for comparison, needs about 20 billion USD to sort themselves out. Bitcoin is out of its league there so far.

Won't adoption 500m Bitcoin by 20b entity lead to x40 price? From 70$ to 2800$ per coin?

[BTC Books]

definition of "market cap" here leaves some room for interpretation. What is "market cap" for a nation state. Could it be it's M1? Probably not.

M1 and market cap are different things for nation states. I.e you cannot buy a country for amount of money equal it's M1.

With Bitcoin we somewhat incorrectly use Bitcoin M1 in it's lose definition as number of bitcoins ever mined multiplied by cureent price. This number is also often and perhaps not very accurately used as Bitcooin market cap. This is based on notion that Bitcoin is like a common stock of a company where every coin is a share.

This is true.

Nevertheless, I will offer you a postulate in trade for your axiom:

The first nation state that adopts bitcoin as its legal currency will be the Switzerland of the 21st century.

How very Kipling...

[Monster Tent]

The russian mafia needs a new place to hide its money after getting fleeced in cyprus.

[BTC Books]

The russian mafia needs a new place to hide its money after getting fleeced in cyprus.

They haven't been fleeced yet.  And their carrier task force steams through the Med.

[cypherdoc]

If this is a really as BIG thing as Vladimir is describing it, then I can think of one thing:

Russia does not like dollar very much. China also. So do probably other asian countries. They may be conspiring to replace dollar in the role of world's reserve currency with Bitcoin.

LOL, nice one. But this kind of BIG is to a different Vladimir please.

Haha.   Cmon Vladimir.

You gotta give him credit.

[BTC Books]

Well, I see that morning has come to the EU - price is up over two BTC in the past hour.

Should be an interesting weekend.

[nwbitcoin]

I'm not sure if your being sarcastic or not, I was under the impression the cap was always 1MB and set by Satoshi himself.

Your impression is incorrect, possibly because the idea that the 1 MB cap has always been present has been deliberately fostered by some people with agendas upon which I can only speculate.

Prior to September 2010 there was no protocol limit on block size, and Satoshi's email messages clearly indicated that he intended the network to scale to very large blocks in the future. MAX_BLOCK_SIZE was added as a temporary anti-spam rule and was always intended to be raised in the future when the network was capable of handing it and needed the extra capacity.

Those who say the limit was always present as a deliberate economic rule are dissembling.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153330.msg1636427#msg1636427

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

There are a number of interesting elements of the bitcoin code which doesn't make sense to someone who just reads the forums.
I know the transaction limit is throttled, and I would guess a number of other elements of the scaling that we are currently discussing is more about power than technology.

Read the original paper, the mail archive and the wiki carefully, and a totally different picture of the potential of bitcoin emerges - one that could easily be a worthy alternative to the global credit card market.

However, taking your investment advice from a few very vague comments on a forum without other info seems stupid!

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I'm not sure if your being sarcastic or not, I was under the impression the cap was always 1MB and set by Satoshi himself.

Your impression is incorrect, possibly because the idea that the 1 MB cap has always been present has been deliberately fostered by some people with agendas upon which I can only speculate.

Prior to September 2010 there was no protocol limit on block size, and Satoshi's email messages clearly indicated that he intended the network to scale to very large blocks in the future. MAX_BLOCK_SIZE was added as a temporary anti-spam rule and was always intended to be raised in the future when the network was capable of handing it and needed the extra capacity.

Those who say the limit was always present as a deliberate economic rule are dissembling.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153330.msg1636427#msg1636427

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

I have nothing against conspiracy theories, but I think you went too far with this one.

Remember that Bitcoin is still an *HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL* project. So everything about it is experimental, including different parameters (like block size limit).

So it is expected that some amount of mess will be generated for testing/balancement/anti-ddos/security purposes in the early stages.

I think that the fixed limit will be removed soon, however. Because it is necessary for the network to scale.

[klaus]

I speculate the OPEC will drop the Dollar and accept only Bitcoin.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I speculate the OPEC will drop the Dollar and accept only Bitcoin.

Well, US would have to start World War III or shut down the Internet completely tomorrow (probably by cutting optical fiber cables like they did last time) if that suddenly happened today.

[cho]

Russia does not like dollar very much. China also. So do probably other asian countries. They may be conspiring to replace dollar in the role of world's reserve currency with Bitcoin.

If that is true, then price will skyrocket to about 100 x of what is it now, and even more.

Actually, russia money supply is around 11T RUB, which would put the current bitcoin at around 1 000 000 RUB, that is around 32 000 $.
To put it another way, 140M people in russia, there are not enough bitcoins to give each russian 0.1 BTC.

[cho]

Meanwhile, I set you all up for an epic "I told you so" post.  

Which will be a fail because you haven't really told anything

[BkkCoins]

What possible mechanism could be used for a nation state to adopt Bitcoin as it's legal currency?

They're not going to just announce it and make there existing currency worthless. They would have difficulty trading their existing currency directly for btc. So they would have to trade their currency for dollars or similar currency first, or trade some commodity like oil for btc. They'd have to accumulate enough btc before announcing so as to have a reserve amount useful for transitioning the govt and citizens into it. I don't really see how this can be done successfully except for a country that has a valuable resource like oil to directly fund itself with bitcoins. ie. sell resource for btc and hold the proceeds as the national reserves and control money flow in the country by spending via govt payments.

The process of accumulating and transitioning itself would raise the Bitcoin capitalization by an amount somewhat equivalent to the nation's M1. So to become the defacto controller of the currency it would actually want current Bitcoin market cap to be much lower than it's M1. Then the nation's cap would essentially supplant the bitcoin cap by becoming it's main holder.

[cho]

What possible mechanism could be used for a nation state to adopt Bitcoin as it's legal currency?

Interesting. I think it makes much more sense to create a national blockchain, spawn a good number of "russiacoins" at initialisation time, choose its own growth rules.
Once you've done that you can open your exchange which accepts rubles and delivers RBTC, maybe at a 1:1 parity.
You might need to write some rules allowing you to create RBTC during the exchange period, because you don't know how much rubles people will come and exchange at your desks.

Once that is done and the exchange period is over, you are now in a country where the ruble has been crypto-currency-upgraded, but it is still a national currency, with legal tender inside the country, but with no special international status.
Do you think this scenario is flawed ?
If not, wouldn't the first "national crypto currency" gain international credibility ? I guess a lot of investors, knowing very well that the Fed is more or less a giant printing press, would be happy to sell dollars and buy this new currency, wouldn't they ?

[justusranvier]

If that is true, then price will skyrocket to about 100 x of what is it now, and even more.

Realistically that scenario implies 2-4 more zeros than just 100 times.

[nwbitcoin]

What possible mechanism could be used for a nation state to adopt Bitcoin as it's legal currency?

Interesting. I think it makes much more sense to create a national blockchain, spawn a good number of "russiacoins" at initialisation time, choose its own growth rules.
Once you've done that you can open your exchange which accepts rubles and delivers RBTC, maybe at a 1:1 parity.
You might need to write some rules allowing you to create RBTC during the exchange period, because you don't know how much rubles people will come and exchange at your desks.

Once that is done and the exchange period is over, you are now in a country where the ruble has been crypto-currency-upgraded, but it is still a national currency, with legal tender inside the country, but with no special international status.
Do you think this scenario is flawed ?
If not, wouldn't the first "national crypto currency" gain international credibility ? I guess a lot of investors, knowing very well that the Fed is more or less a giant printing press, would be happy to sell dollars and buy this new currency, wouldn't they ?

That is a phenomenal idea, especially for regions who have to use money they have no control of - like maybe a Euroblock country, or a US state.

Looking at it practically, if you had an area with let's say, 4 million people, but their currency was being issued by a central bank somewhere, these people could use the regional crypto coins for their day to day purchasing, while letting the government carry on using fiat. Each person would have a few bitcoins, and the cap value of the coins wouldn't go to much more than gold today.  Assuming that once people had paid their taxes, their pay packet would be converted to bitcoins.  It would be a win / win because the government auditors wouldn't get upset, as they could still print out money to make the books balance, while the people were not going to get taxed by stealth inflation!

Its far too sensible to be legal!

[00null]

Meanwhile, I set you all up for an epic "I told you so" post.  

Didn't a certain pirate write something quite similar a year ago?

[01BTC10]

Bitcoin will bailout Cyprus if they drop the Euro. 

[tcp_rst]

All current limitations of Bitcoin aside, remember that the entire system is ultimately dependent on Internet connectivity.  Any grand plans for nation state adoption require broadly deployed Internet service.  Yes there are technologies that address this but they are quite immature.  Just saying, it needs to be considered as a factor depending on who you're talking about.  Cyprus, as an example since it's the favorite mention du jour, does not have very good Internet service on the whole.  In fact, it's quite poor.