What price would you stop buying Bitcoin?

[FlamingFingers]

Now something that as value is backed by mathematics.. no ressources or power involved.  Just math !
It's a great revolution toward progress that Crypto-Blockchain stuff bring to humanity !Evolution!

Be careful with "backed by math".  It is backed by the math that a miner consortium decides to put into the software they are running to make the block chain.  You may think that the 21 million coins are "fixed by math", but that's not true.  They are only fixed by the lines of software that are running now on the nodes of the miner pools.  The only thing that withholds them from changing that, is the *psychological* barrier ; the fact that this was so hammered into the minds of the users that if ever they dare to change that, the whole belief system crumbles.  But it is not "backed by math", at all.

Where does this 21 million come from ?  It comes from the fact that there's a piece of software that has a counter, and every 210 000 blocks, it halves the block reward.

Here's that piece of code:


It means that during 210 000 blocks, there were 50 coins ; then there were 25 coins in the next 210 000 blocks, etc....

As 50 + 25 + 12.5 + 6.25 + .... = 100

we have that in total, *if this piece of software continues to run unchanged for the next 100 years or so*, there will be 210 000 * 100 = 21 000 000 coins in total.

If tomorrow, all the miner pools together (there are about 20 of them) decide to change those few lines of code, you can print just as many bitcoin as you want.  No math, apart from the trivial math that calculates the sum when you have the lines of code, in the same way that "the math determines the emission of fiat currency", when a central bank prints, say, a million dollars a day, you can say that "the math" fixes the amount of dollars printed per year to 365 million.

Good point, but you know, as well, that miners would never do so – reason: Bitcoin becomes nothing. If there wasn't a 21 Million limitation, price wouldn't go as high as it's now (or higher in the future). So 'Math' still has a role in this, as manipulating it leads to catastrophic disasters.

On topic, I have stopped buying bitcoin since the price went to $1500 – it is very high for me to buy even 0.1BTC with USD$. Instead, I am working on making Bitcoins in other ways (not just my signature).  

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[digaran]

Whenever I need to pay for something using Bitcoin then I will pay the amount in fiat and buy then send Bitcoin only with a few percent difference which is deducted as fees but it wont effect my buying power much.

If you are a trader and constantly doing small and big trades, again it wont effect your tradings that much.

But if you are a miner and selling your coins as you mine them it will definitely change things for you.

At the moment I'm not buying any altcoins because they are in a fake pump stage, so no need to buy Bitcoin for me but no matter the price as long as I can sell back with a few percent difference I will pay the price, market price.

[dinofelis]

Now something that as value is backed by mathematics.. no ressources or power involved.  Just math !
It's a great revolution toward progress that Crypto-Blockchain stuff bring to humanity !Evolution!

Be careful with "backed by math".  It is backed by the math that a miner consortium decides to put into the software they are running to make the block chain.  You may think that the 21 million coins are "fixed by math", but that's not true.  They are only fixed by the lines of software that are running now on the nodes of the miner pools.  The only thing that withholds them from changing that, is the *psychological* barrier ; the fact that this was so hammered into the minds of the users that if ever they dare to change that, the whole belief system crumbles.  But it is not "backed by math", at all.

Where does this 21 million come from ?  It comes from the fact that there's a piece of software that has a counter, and every 210 000 blocks, it halves the block reward.

Here's that piece of code:


It means that during 210 000 blocks, there were 50 coins ; then there were 25 coins in the next 210 000 blocks, etc....

As 50 + 25 + 12.5 + 6.25 + .... = 100

we have that in total, *if this piece of software continues to run unchanged for the next 100 years or so*, there will be 210 000 * 100 = 21 000 000 coins in total.

If tomorrow, all the miner pools together (there are about 20 of them) decide to change those few lines of code, you can print just as many bitcoin as you want.  No math, apart from the trivial math that calculates the sum when you have the lines of code, in the same way that "the math determines the emission of fiat currency", when a central bank prints, say, a million dollars a day, you can say that "the math" fixes the amount of dollars printed per year to 365 million.

Well that's an interesting perspective, but could you please elaborate more?

As far as I understand, the total number of Bitcoins  is the sum of a Geometric series (S):

 S = 210000 x 50 x ( 1 / (1 - 0.5) ) = 21 million.

If we already have a given geometric series, how can we change change its sum?

The total number of bitcoins is the sum of a Geometric series, because that is what is programmed in the piece of code I quoted.  If you change that code (that is, if the miners change that code), then this sum becomes whatever you program there.  There is no "mathematical constraint" in bitcoin that would make bitcoin cryptographically fail or something if this changed - that's what I mean by "backed by mathematics".   Suppose for instance, that there was a bitcoin to be created for every block number being a prime number, and that this prime number played an essential cryptographic role without which, the system would simply not function.  Then you could say that the emission rate of bitcoin was somehow "backed by mathematics".

But the "backed by mathematics" is in our case, simply the sum of the numbers that have been programmed by a few lines of code: if you change those lines of code, then the "mathematics" will simply sum to something else.  Like I said, change this line :

nSubsidy >>= halvings;

into

nSubsidy <<= halvings;

and you have now a doubling instead of a halving every 4 years, and the sum of all coins is "backed by mathematics" to become infinite.

If all miners do that and agree on that, then right now, they start earning, not 12.5 coins, but rather 200 coins per block, and in a good 3 years, 400 coins per block.

BTW, that would have been a wiser emission curve (at least for a while), to emit more coins when adoption grows, rather than give all the stash to a few early adopters, but silly belief in sound money theory fucked up bitcoin - but now bitcoin is stuck in that belief system.

[dinofelis]

Good point, but you know, as well, that miners would never do so – reason: Bitcoin becomes nothing. If there wasn't a 21 Million limitation, price wouldn't go as high as it's now (or higher in the future). So 'Math' still has a role in this, as manipulating it leads to catastrophic disasters.

As you say yourself, it is not math, but psychology.  If miners would touch it, the *belief* in "bitcoin to the moon" would be hurt, and "bitcoin to the moon" belief is what sustains its speculative market.    It is also what makes bitcoin a bad currency (no stable value).

There is no "mathematical guarantee" on bitcoin's emission curve.  That's my whole point.  The bitcoin emission curve is a matter of convention between miners, in the same way that block size is.  But the psychology and the game theory are such, that nobody dares to change it.

[iram3130]

I'll stop buying Bitcoin as soon as 1 Satoshi hit the price of $1, till then I have a plan of buying Bitcoin whenever price gets lower than the regular. But after that it's just holding and selling at the right point. We would trade satoshi's then I guess.

[xuan87]

I won't stop buying and selling because I am doing trading with bitcoin, so as long as there is a potential to earn profit then I won't stop buy and sell, but for investment I have stop buying when the price reaching 1000$, now I never buy any bitcoin anymore, I am earning bitcoin now for my investment

[DoublerHunter]

I won't stop buying and selling because I am doing trading with bitcoin, so as long as there is a potential to earn profit then I won't stop buy and sell, but for investment I have stop buying when the price reaching 1000$, now I never buy any bitcoin anymore, I am earning bitcoin now for my investment

I agree with you, there is no particular price for the traders to stop buying bitcoin because as long as the market is active and you can still do traders often then you can buy whatever the price and do trades and make some money with it because a trader is not focusing on the price but on the movement of the market and how can he generate money with his assets.

[Betwrong]

Now something that as value is backed by mathematics.. no ressources or power involved.  Just math !
It's a great revolution toward progress that Crypto-Blockchain stuff bring to humanity !Evolution!

Be careful with "backed by math".  It is backed by the math that a miner consortium decides to put into the software they are running to make the block chain.  You may think that the 21 million coins are "fixed by math", but that's not true.  They are only fixed by the lines of software that are running now on the nodes of the miner pools.  The only thing that withholds them from changing that, is the *psychological* barrier ; the fact that this was so hammered into the minds of the users that if ever they dare to change that, the whole belief system crumbles.  But it is not "backed by math", at all.

Where does this 21 million come from ?  It comes from the fact that there's a piece of software that has a counter, and every 210 000 blocks, it halves the block reward.

Here's that piece of code:


It means that during 210 000 blocks, there were 50 coins ; then there were 25 coins in the next 210 000 blocks, etc....

As 50 + 25 + 12.5 + 6.25 + .... = 100

we have that in total, *if this piece of software continues to run unchanged for the next 100 years or so*, there will be 210 000 * 100 = 21 000 000 coins in total.

If tomorrow, all the miner pools together (there are about 20 of them) decide to change those few lines of code, you can print just as many bitcoin as you want.  No math, apart from the trivial math that calculates the sum when you have the lines of code, in the same way that "the math determines the emission of fiat currency", when a central bank prints, say, a million dollars a day, you can say that "the math" fixes the amount of dollars printed per year to 365 million.

Well that's an interesting perspective, but could you please elaborate more?

As far as I understand, the total number of Bitcoins  is the sum of a Geometric series (S):

 S = 210000 x 50 x ( 1 / (1 - 0.5) ) = 21 million.

If we already have a given geometric series, how can we change change its sum?

The total number of bitcoins is the sum of a Geometric series, because that is what is programmed in the piece of code I quoted.  If you change that code (that is, if the miners change that code), then this sum becomes whatever you program there.  There is no "mathematical constraint" in bitcoin that would make bitcoin cryptographically fail or something if this changed - that's what I mean by "backed by mathematics".   Suppose for instance, that there was a bitcoin to be created for every block number being a prime number, and that this prime number played an essential cryptographic role without which, the system would simply not function.  Then you could say that the emission rate of bitcoin was somehow "backed by mathematics".

But the "backed by mathematics" is in our case, simply the sum of the numbers that have been programmed by a few lines of code: if you change those lines of code, then the "mathematics" will simply sum to something else.  Like I said, change this line :

nSubsidy >>= halvings;

into

nSubsidy <<= halvings;

and you have now a doubling instead of a halving every 4 years, and the sum of all coins is "backed by mathematics" to become infinite.

If all miners do that and agree on that, then right now, they start earning, not 12.5 coins, but rather 200 coins per block, and in a good 3 years, 400 coins per block.

BTW, that would have been a wiser emission curve (at least for a while), to emit more coins when adoption grows, rather than give all the stash to a few early adopters, but silly belief in sound money theory fucked up bitcoin - but now bitcoin is stuck in that belief system.

Many thanks for the profound explanation. I'm not that good at math and maybe that's why I still think it's impossible without totally ruining Bitcoin to make those changes. Since there's no way miners want to ruin Bitcoin they would never agree on making those changes to the code. But theoretically you are right I think. At least I can't prove otherwise.

[Preclus]

Many thanks for the profound explanation. I'm not that good at math and maybe that's why I still think it's impossible without totally ruining Bitcoin to make those changes. Since there's no way miners want to ruin Bitcoin they would never agree on making those changes to the code. But theoretically you are right I think. At least I can't prove otherwise.

Why would changing the code ruin bitcoin? Does anyone holding bitcoins care about the limit on the number of bitcoins or the fees the miners are making? All they care about is a price increase. Why should removing the limit on number cause the price to drop? Ethereum is an excellent example that shows that nobody cares about the mathematics of the coin, all they care about is if they think they can sell it to someone else at a higher price in the future.

In fact, you could make a good argument that removing the limit on the number of bitcoins would cause the price to go up as it makes the system more viable.

[Betwrong]

Many thanks for the profound explanation. I'm not that good at math and maybe that's why I still think it's impossible without totally ruining Bitcoin to make those changes. Since there's no way miners want to ruin Bitcoin they would never agree on making those changes to the code. But theoretically you are right I think. At least I can't prove otherwise.

Why would changing the code ruin bitcoin? Does anyone holding bitcoins care about the limit on the number of bitcoins or the fees the miners are making? All they care about is a price increase. Why should removing the limit on number cause the price to drop? Ethereum is an excellent example that shows that nobody cares about the mathematics of the coin, all they care about is if they think they can sell it to someone else at a higher price in the future.

In fact, you could make a good argument that removing the limit on the number of bitcoins would cause the price to go up as it makes the system more viable.

I think if people can mine much more Bitcoins with the same effort the price of it will inevitably drop. And when the price starts dropping most holders have no time to analyze whether it's just a temporary thing or not, they just start to sell their coins and then the price drops even more.

[dinofelis]

Many thanks for the profound explanation. I'm not that good at math and maybe that's why I still think it's impossible without totally ruining Bitcoin to make those changes. Since there's no way miners want to ruin Bitcoin they would never agree on making those changes to the code. But theoretically you are right I think. At least I can't prove otherwise.

Why would changing the code ruin bitcoin? Does anyone holding bitcoins care about the limit on the number of bitcoins or the fees the miners are making? All they care about is a price increase. Why should removing the limit on number cause the price to drop? Ethereum is an excellent example that shows that nobody cares about the mathematics of the coin, all they care about is if they think they can sell it to someone else at a higher price in the future.

In fact, you could make a good argument that removing the limit on the number of bitcoins would cause the price to go up as it makes the system more viable.

I wholeheartedly agree with you.  In fact, the limited emission of bitcoins to a finite number, creates many fundamental problems, macro-economical, but also technical/economical.

My macro-economical complaint with bitcoin is that it is designed to be highly speculative, will never stabilize and will hence never be a unit of account, which will always make it a marginal means of payment at best, and a gambler's/speculator's/investor's toy dominantly.

But its reducing emission causes a lot of problems on lower levels too.  The whole fee market battle by miners comes about because their block rewards will dry up in the future.  Who says fee rewards, says scarce transactions, and hence artificially obstructed transaction system.  The reduced block rewards have also pushed the competition in mining to the extreme.

An emission curve that emits less assets when more users come in, gives HUGE seigniorage advantage to early adopters, and pushes speculation to unseen heights.  Even if the idea was to come to a limited amount of coins, the largest emissions shouldn't have happened when nobody was around.  This turns bitcoin into rare paintings of which a few early collectors have HUGE amounts, leading to a very unequal distribution of coins (not by the normal functioning of a market but by early bird adopters), which give rise to big whales, which can then play the market like they wish with their significant stash (read: pump 'n dump, corner, crash, ....).

The reducing block reward will also make the security by PoW *relatively speaking* less and less secure.  After all, the PoW securization is financed by the rewards, which reduce.  An attack has thus a cost, in relationship to the total amount of reward per block, which is decreasing in BTC.  It can be increasing in $$ of course, but in BTC, it is decreasing.  The *incentive* for an attack, however, will remain formulated in BTC: it is the ability to undo a transaction a few confirmations ago.  As such, the ratio between attack cost and attack incentive, is decreasing with effective block reward decrease.

[Hutalar]

The price of Bitcoin is hitting new highs regularly now...  and yet it is expected to continue rising.  At what price would you stop buying? 

I know that the price of bitcoin will not stop rising till each and every coin is mined and till each and every person of the world adopt bitcoin so I will not stop buying bitcoin till that time and after that I will still buy for my needs as from that time there will be no any lose in bitcoin because of the worldwide marketcap.

[mmo4me.2016]

The current price of BTC is quite high, I only buy when I need to exchange, there is no plan to store BTC! High price and always change so it is not suitable for my job.

[stompix]

The price of Bitcoin is hitting new highs regularly now...  and yet it is expected to continue rising.  At what price would you stop buying? 

I know that the price of bitcoin will not stop rising till each and every coin is mined and till each and every person of the world adopt bitcoin so I will not stop buying bitcoin till that time and after that I will still buy for my needs as from that time there will be no any lose in bitcoin because of the worldwide marketcap.

Just a heads up....
The last bitcoin will be mined in a hundred or so years currently it looks like 2140..

So I really doubt that you'll be able to buy continuously until then...

The current price of BTC is quite high, I only buy when I need to exchange, there is no plan to store BTC! High price and always change so it is not suitable for my job.

Why is not suitable for your job to buy and hold bitcoin?
Or if your job is so complicated why not do this yourself?

[DeathAngel]

I've stopped buying now, I have a cold storage stash & I'm going to have to be happy with what I have. Too expensive to start buying multiple coins again now.

[Daniel91]

The current price of BTC is quite high, I only buy when I need to exchange, there is no plan to store BTC! High price and always change so it is not suitable for my job.

I agree that currently btc price is to high for average users.
When bitcoin price was about $ 250-300, it was still affordable for the most btc users.
Now, I don't think that many people can afford to buy significant amount of btc with own funds.
So, they will have no choice but to try to collect bitcoin in other ways, like collecting faucets, signature campaigns, gambling, HYIP etc.
I personally didn't try to buy bitcoin since last year.

[Drnice]

The price of Bitcoin is hitting new highs regularly now...  and yet it is expected to continue rising.  At what price would you stop buying? 

there might be no particular time to stop buying, if there is, it would have been years back. For now the price is increasing so are there more people getting know to Bitcoin, so buying it more will be good for a time to sell and make more profit.

[chickenado]

The price of Bitcoin is hitting new highs regularly now...  and yet it is expected to continue rising.  At what price would you stop buying? 

If the price of bitcoin is too high and the price is ready to dump I will stop buying bitcoin because many big whales will sell their bitcoin.  And I will start buying again if the price dumps, that's the right time to collect many bitcoin.

[silverduck]

The price of Bitcoin is hitting new highs regularly now...  and yet it is expected to continue rising.  At what price would you stop buying? 

there might be no particular time to stop buying, if there is, it would have been years back. For now the price is increasing so are there more people getting know to Bitcoin, so buying it more will be good for a time to sell and make more profit.

Everyone is speculating that price will touch $2000 in this year or even it can go beyond that so if you have a same feeling that you can buy them even now and sell them when it crosses that price so in that case you can make good profits in really very good time.

[jossiel]

I've stopped buying now, I have a cold storage stash & I'm going to have to be happy with what I have. Too expensive to start buying multiple coins again now.

I will stop on buying bitcoin right now the price gets higher and I don't consider to buy some more because it is really hard to balance my budget and savings.

But I'm taking the advantage of earning some with the price increase.

Though I don't plan to buy anymore.