$10 VS. $10,000 - What Say You?

[Melbustus]

There's actually a significant difference between $1k and $10k. While I think it's true to state that if bitcoin is worth $100, it's worth $1000, going to $10k/btc does necessitate crossing some big use-case barriers.

At the full 21M coins, 1 BTC = $1000 means a market-cap of ~$21B. That's still a toy in terms of global influence. There are dozens of *individuals* with more wealth than that, and the M2 of small-ish countries is still larger than that. Which is the same situation as today; ie, 1 BTC = $200.

But go another order of magnitude up, and that changes. At $200B, bitcoin would be a major world currency, eclipsed by only a few national currencies, and a major store-of-value asset, comprising a double-digit percentage of gold's private investment demand equivalent. It really would have to be "grown up" to hit those marks. By contrast, the implied market cap of hitting $1000 is not that materially different from where bitcoin sits in terms of economic influence today.

[Qoheleth]

At the moment, a sell of about 200kBTC would bring us back to $10/coin, if only momentarily. So to me, this question is really: "will we see $10k/coin before a Shamir user decides that they want out?"

To me, that's a bit of a toss-up. It's not clear that anyone in the 100kBTC club would want to cash out, but on the other hand, it's not clear that we'll ever see 10k$/coin, especially if other blockchains with new, interesting features get popular (a prospect that seems not that unlikely to me). I think, given all that, I favor the $10/coin scenario slightly over the $10k/coin scenario.

On the other hand, I think $1000 is quite a bit closer than $10.

[e4xit]

At the moment, a sell of about 200kBTC would bring us back to $10/coin, if only momentarily. So to me, this question is really: "will we see $10k/coin before a Shamir user decides that they want out?"

I am interested to know what/who a "Shamir user" is, if you wouldn't mind elaborating for me. I know of the mathmatician Shamir and the outline of his work with ECC etc but have never seen this description "Shamir user" before.

Thanks

EDIT: $10,000 I woudl argue would be more likely than $10, although, a prohibition/outlawing of BTC in the USA might push the time taken to reach such a level quite a bit

[evansearle42]

$1000 is the answer, but why did you do this $1000?

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

$1000 is the answer, but why did you do this $1000?

I edited $1000 to $10000 as it was evident $1000 was not enough to make people think twice.

[Qoheleth]

I am interested to know what/who a "Shamir user" is, if you wouldn't mind elaborating for me. I know of the mathmatician Shamir and the outline of his work with ECC etc but have never seen this description "Shamir user" before.

Shamir published a paper analyzing the flow of coins in the Bitcoin network as of May 2012. One of the interesting takeaways was that certain coins seem to be mined and then moved around between a closed set of addresses which never have commerce with the rest of the network - Shamir's conclusion was that these were likely owned by individuals who wanted to make it less obvious that they were sitting on huge bitcoin stashes. Based on this information, the paper puts together a list of 19 "interesting" users, which either do a lot of transactions, or hold a lot of coins, or both:

Entity ID	Number of Addresses	Accumulated Incoming BTC's	Number of Transactions
A	78,251	2,886,650	246,012
B (Mt.Gox)	156,722	2,206,170	477,526
C	13,289	941,013	77,525
D	12,520	867,996	48,347
E	191	692,864	1,353
F	12	660,000	23
G (Instawallet)	23,649	633,606	92,593
H	9	580,000	59
I	10,561	514,066	49,550
J	4	500,021	6
K	134	479,254	1,039
L (Deepbit)	2	452,929	814,044
M	9	442,000	10
N	128	432,161	137
O	10	432,286	14
P	1	432,078	3
Q	14	430,490	23
R	2,124	321,866	300,486
S	1,037	20,308	197,334

The paper is a bone of contention around here; in particular, there's a number of people who hold that User A is a result of Shamir misinterpreting the data, and that the addresses (which the paper claims are controlled by one person moving their bitcoins around to make the coins look like they aren't hoarded) are in fact multiple people using BTC in the expected way. But even if you buy that, many of the later users on this list - cliques of a dozen cold storage addresses, containing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins - are much less likely to be misinterpretations.

These old-coin stockpilers, with the ability to single-handedly crash the BTC market, I've taken to referring to as "Shamir users".

[wobber]

I am interested to know what/who a "Shamir user" is, if you wouldn't mind elaborating for me. I know of the mathmatician Shamir and the outline of his work with ECC etc but have never seen this description "Shamir user" before.

Shamir published a paper analyzing the flow of coins in the Bitcoin network as of May 2012. One of the interesting takeaways was that certain coins seem to be mined and then moved around between a closed set of addresses which never have commerce with the rest of the network - Shamir's conclusion was that these were likely owned by individuals who wanted to make it less obvious that they were sitting on huge bitcoin stashes. Based on this information, the paper puts together a list of 19 "interesting" users, which either do a lot of transactions, or hold a lot of coins, or both:

Entity ID	Number of Addresses	Accumulated Incoming BTC's	Number of Transactions
A	78,251	2,886,650	246,012
B (Mt.Gox)	156,722	2,206,170	477,526
C	13,289	941,013	77,525
D	12,520	867,996	48,347
E	191	692,864	1,353
F	12	660,000	23
G (Instawallet)	23,649	633,606	92,593
H	9	580,000	59
I	10,561	514,066	49,550
J	4	500,021	6
K	134	479,254	1,039
L (Deepbit)	2	452,929	814,044
M	9	442,000	10
N	128	432,161	137
O	10	432,286	14
P	1	432,078	3
Q	14	430,490	23
R	2,124	321,866	300,486
S	1,037	20,308	197,334

The paper is a bone of contention around here; in particular, there's a number of people who hold that User A is a result of Shamir misinterpreting the data, and that the addresses (which the paper claims are controlled by one person moving their bitcoins around to make the coins look like they aren't hoarded) are in fact multiple people using BTC in the expected way. But even if you buy that, many of the later users on this list - cliques of a dozen cold storage addresses, containing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins - are much less likely to be misinterpretations.

These old-coin stockpilers, with the ability to single-handedly crash the BTC market, I've taken to referring to as "Shamir users".

Interesting and pertinent argument. Thank you!