In an ideal world, what is the future of Bitcoin?

[FFMG]

Hi,

Assuming that things keep going the way they are now, Bitcoin will start been used more and more over the internet, (and, as a result, probably be used more and more away from the web).

(and, please, correct me if I am wrong).

This will mean at most, 21M, Bitcoins floating around, (assuming nothing is lost), is that not a bit 'little' for a world wide market?

Realistically, how much would a coffee. a car, a house cost? To be usable, a single coin would have to cost, 100x, 1000x what it is worth now, (one could even say more than that).

And, again assuming that everything is going in the right direction, would asking for BTC0,0000001 for a cup of coffee not be a bit impractical?
Should we not start using some other name for such small numbers?

Finally, is there a plan to replace the coins that are lost forever? Otherwise the market will slowly but surely run out of coins.

FFMG

[RaTTuS]

yes
no
depends
BTC can be dived down to 8 decimals
ther are names
and no

see
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

[LaggedOnUser]

21M is an odd number for a coin.  And it is broken into such small units (.00000001 BTC = 1 satoshi).  I think Bitcoin is already the world's highest-valued currency unit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-valued_currency_unit).  The 2nd highest is the Kuwaiti dinar, which is worth $3.51.  Bitcoins are currently trading for $156.82.  To me, this seems to give it an excessive amount of transactions in fractional value, and seems to be a weakness of the original design.  I suspect that the inventor,  Satoshi Nakamoto, simply didn't expect it to become as popular as it has, or didn't pay much attention to this aspect of the design.  Although I suppose the flaw isn't too terrible, since things can always be priced in millicoins (0.001 BTC) or microcoins (0.000001 BTC).

As to its increasing usage, that is unknown and speculative.  As a technology, Bitcoin could always be replaced by something better that consumes less energy or has more official support.  There are already so many Bitcoin clones crowding the market that it may become fragmented like Linux, hindering its wider adoption.  The major push for recent usage of Bitcoin seems to have come from Europe where they are having ongoing banking crises, thus many have learned that their money invested in Euros is not entirely safe.  There is no guarantee that this sort of interest will continue, though.  I don't think the average member of the investing public even understands Bitcoin or how to value it.

There is at present no plan that I am aware of to replace lost coins.  The problem is that there is no way to distinguish a "lost coin" from a coin that is being saved by someone for later spending.  On the other hand, with each lost coin, the other coins become more valuable, and they can always subdivide the coins further to extract more value from them.  Some economists think that this is a flaw in the design, also, because the coins are deflationary, meaning they grow in value over time, which encourages hoarding of the coins and reduces the available of currency to be used for spending.  If you don't like these qualities, there are altcoins (alternative coins) that have some rate of inflation built in, which would help with these issues.

[hello_good_sir]

2054: Bitcoin has replaced all money, and a satoshi is worth about $40, well it would be if dollars still existed.  The protocol has been updated to add another eight decimal places.  In common usage people use the following units: satoshi (worth about $40), bitpenny (worth about $0.40), and gavin (worth about 0.04).  Prices are commonly shown in satoshis and gavins.  Bitpennies are coins with computer chips in them, each chip has a wallet on it with 0.01 satoshis.  These coins are used by people in poor countries and by children everywhere.

MTGOX.com is a site that allows you to buy and sell magic cards.  There is no need for bitcoin exchanges, because what would you exchange them for?

Economic growth is consistently strong, about 5% per year in most areas and higher in areas recovering from war (such as the European Union after its civil war, and the nations of the former United States).  Prices keep falling but wages stay the same.  Africa is still a horrible place and barely uses bitcoin.

Banks charge monthly fees now and offer far fewer services.  They pretty much just store your money and allow you to access it with your debit card.  Mortgages, savings accounts, CDs, and all that are a thing of the past.  Banks don't have the clout or power that they used to; they're just like any other service.  The idea of bailing out banks seems as absurd as bailing out a fast-food restaurant.

Most people have never heard of bitcoin mining.  They have no idea how transactions are processed.  Most people don't even have a bitcoin client of any sort and have never made a bitcoin transaction.  They keep their money in the bank, or they pull it out as cash (paper wallets).  Survivalists, nerds, libertarians, and the paranoid actually have bitcoin clients and keep most of their savings in cold storage.  They say things like "if you don't have your bitcoins on your hard drive or in a paper wallet that you've made yourself then they aren't your bitcoins".  Normal people laugh at them and say things like "what backwards people, what strange ideas, nothing they say or do will ever amount to anything".

The European Union has a lot of debt from its war against its break-away provinces.  Those bonds aren't going to repay themselves... or are they?  Recently the EU parliment has voted to authorize the creation of a central bank in order to promote fractional reserve banking.  They reassure the public that they will stay on the bitcoin standard and that notes will always be redeemable for cold hard bits.

[cr1776]

+1 (or sooner)

2054: Bitcoin has replaced all money, and a satoshi is worth about $40, well it would be if dollars still existed.  The protocol has been updated to add another eight decimal places.  In common usage people use the following units: satoshi (worth about $40), bitpenny (worth about $0.40), and gavin (worth about 0.04).  Prices are commonly shown in satoshis and gavins.  Bitpennies are coins with computer chips in them, each chip has a wallet on it with 0.01 satoshis.  These coins are used by people in poor countries and by children everywhere.

MTGOX.com is a site that allows you to buy and sell magic cards.  There is no need for bitcoin exchanges, because what would you exchange them for?

Economic growth is consistently strong, about 5% per year in most areas and higher in areas recovering from war (such as the European Union after its civil war, and the nations of the former United States).  Prices keep falling but wages stay the same.  Africa is still a horrible place and barely uses bitcoin.

Banks charge monthly fees now and offer far fewer services.  They pretty much just store your money and allow you to access it with your debit card.  Mortgages, savings accounts, CDs, and all that are a thing of the past.  Banks don't have the clout or power that they used to; they're just like any other service.  The idea of bailing out banks seems as absurd as bailing out a fast-food restaurant.

Most people have never heard of bitcoin mining.  They have no idea how transactions are processed.  Most people don't even have a bitcoin client of any sort and have never made a bitcoin transaction.  They keep their money in the bank, or they pull it out as cash (paper wallets).  Survivalists, nerds, libertarians, and the paranoid actually have bitcoin clients and keep most of their savings in cold storage.  They say things like "if you don't have your bitcoins on your hard drive or in a paper wallet that you've made yourself then they aren't your bitcoins".  Normal people laugh at them and say things like "what backwards people, what strange ideas, nothing they say or do will ever amount to anything".

The European Union has a lot of debt from its war against its break-away provinces.  Those bonds aren't going to repay themselves... or are they?  Recently the EU parliment has voted to authorize the creation of a central bank in order to promote fractional reserve banking.  They reassure the public that they will stay on the bitcoin standard and that notes will always be redeemable for cold hard bits.

[liberty90]

Africa is still a horrible place and barely uses bitcoin.

Economic growth in Africa is quite strong, and in 2064 they should be comparable to today's eastern Europe, if currents trends continue.

Otherwise, very realistic.

[Stampbit]

In an ideal world there will be no bitcoin because we wouldnt need money.


Bitcoin will be around for a while but competitors with much more efficient algorithms and better features will take its place. For now we are only seeing bits and pieces of improvements made in alt-coins.

[jdbtracker]

Bitcoin the assent:

2013: The war against Bitcoin begins, Governments in a desperate attempt to retain control of their populations through economic means begin to mine bitcoins on massive supercomputers, in a futile attempt to fight back the tide of ever increasing world wide Bitcoin miners, that overwhelmingly out-compute them 2000 to 1.
         Governments begin destroying bitcoins in mass as they are churning them out, unaware that due to the value of the coins pegged to their own fiat currencies have effectively begun to virtually destroy the money that they have themselves been printing for years. The increasing loss of bitcoins from the marketplace create an ever increasing value of bitcoin... the inevitable happens. The governments in their attempt to destroy Bitcoin have skyrocketed the price of bitcoin till the final hard coded denomination of Bitcoin is reached; The Satoshi. With the ever increasing price, having reached the hard limit it becomes inpractical to use Bitcoin currency.
  
2021: Gloating in their relief, Governments begin to fire up their massive printing presses to recover from the years of deflationary attrition that they inflicted on themselves as they destroyed bitcoin after bitcoin that their massive mainframes had generated. on the brink of collapse both Government forces and the Bitcoin machine rendered useless, begin to fork into their respective fates.

2022: The battle had raged for so long the inevitable optimizations that had been built into Bitcoin had done their intended effect: Computing technology had been driven thousands of times faster than moore's law, Terabit Internet had been rolled out worldwide to the remotest parts of the earth, Everyone on earth had access to the collective knowledge and wisdom of Billions of human minds, automation had taken over every facet of human life as humans focused on earning bitcoins and not a living.
         The Human Singularity had come; Thousands of human minds working together solving all problems that have ever existed, Humanities distributed united front brought together by Bitcoin had broken all barriers of poverty, borders, ideologies, having distributed the wealth of the world equally across the planet, elevating minds consumed with being employed into being productive focused individuals ready to help the collective.

2023: Satoshi Nakamoto awakens, having laid dormant in the heart of humanity for a decade, begins to spread the true wealth of the human soul, The Source Of Wisdom.

[rhinospray]

Ideal world and bitcoin just don't mix.

[fox19891989]

Every holder must be rich

[agentbluescreen]

And, again assuming that everything is going in the right direction, would asking for BTC0,0000001 for a cup of coffee not be a bit impractical?
Should we not start using some other name for such small numbers?

Metric scientific notation-names already exist for them

BTC = base
BTC0.1 = 1 deciBTC also dBTC
BTC0.01 = 1 centiBTC also cBTC
BTC0.001 = 1 milliBTC also mBTC
BTC0.0001 = 1 microBTC also µBTC
BTC0.00001 = 1 nanoBTC also nBTC
BTC0.000001 = 1 picoBTC also pBTC
BTC0.0000001 = 1 femtoBTC also fBTC
BTC0.00000001 = 1 sitoshiBTC also sBTC

"Sitoshi" has been chosen to replace the normal "atto" that would otherwise follow "femto" in scientific notation for the highest possible ("Arig)atto"-unit. ("very much" in Japanese)

Domo

[rhinospray]

You got wrong the metric system and the name of the smallest unit. From the wiki:

There is a lot of discussion about the naming of these fractions of bitcoins. The leading candidates are:

    1 BTC = 1 bitcoin
    0.01 BTC = 1 cBTC = 1 centibitcoin (also referred to as bitcent)
    0.001 BTC = 1 mBTC = 1 millibitcoin (also referred to as mbit (pronounced em-bit) or millibit or even bitmill)
    0.000 001 BTC = 1 μBTC = 1 microbitcoin (also referred to as ubit (pronounced yu-bit) or microbit)

One exception is the "satoshi" which is smallest denomination currently possible

    0.000 000 01 BTC = 1 satoshi (pronounced sa-toh-shee)