Bitcoin shortage - Is it Possible?

[EriksonPartners]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

[pat4cryptoreal]

It is not possible for us to have shortage. When there is high demand for bitcoin the price will directly increase and the least fraction will be expensive and profitable. That is not shortage. People will only avoid satoshi not full bitcoin.

[xvids]

Nope I don't think that it is possible,
Bitcoin has small fractions so even if all of the supply has been mined it would never have a shortage,
The price of Sats could get higher and I don't think that there could be a shortage since every sats count ,
I don't even think that we could see 1 Sats =$1 .
So it would really be impossible.

[Pursuer]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

your question doesn't have anything to do with value of bitcoin or price.

shortage of bitcoin can only happen if there were more people wanting to have some amount of bitcoin but there weren't enough for them. for example this can happen if an extremely large number of coins were lost. the amount has to be huge though, something like 15 millions bitcoin lost! but that is highly unlikely to happen.
so we will continue to have a little less than the cap which is 21000000.00000000 bitcoin and that is enough for the world.

[Muzika]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

in our time it is impossible there are lots of bitcoin to be mine and halving will took place to it, and we are all dead after the last bitcoin will be halve, and since there are some instances that the bitcoin are on the address that no has an owner it will affect the market of bitcoin in the end.

[mk4]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

your question doesn't have anything to do with value of bitcoin or price.

shortage of bitcoin can only happen if there were more people wanting to have some amount of bitcoin but there weren't enough for them. for example this can happen if an extremely large number of coins were lost. the amount has to be huge though, something like 15 millions bitcoin lost! but that is highly unlikely to happen.
so we will continue to have a little less than the cap which is 21000000.00000000 bitcoin and that is enough for the world.

And also, if ever 15 millions of bitcoin actually gets lost, always remember that bitcoin is very divisible. Satoshi or "sats" currently being the smallest denomination(8 decimal places) that's currently being used.

[dothebeats]

There will be no shortage in bitcoin no matter the situation is. Considering that bitcoin is divisible into lower units just like mjqlqw said, even if there's a handful of bitcoin left for the world to share, everyone can still receive their part of the pie. Also, nobody needs to have one whole bitcoin for them to be considered owners of bitcoin, even a handful of dust makes you one proud owner of a revolutionary cryptocurrency, so why think of shortage when it's entirely out of the question?

[avikz]

Nope I don't think that it is possible,
Bitcoin has small fractions so even if all of the supply has been mined it would never have a shortage,
The price of Sats could get higher and I don't think that there could be a shortage since every sats count ,
I don't even think that we could see 1 Sats =$1 .
So it would really be impossible.

That's good for theory! But bitcoin shortage can actually happen in real life. Even if the demand increases to some unforeseen height and the price follows the same pattern, we will have 8 decimals to use. Now as per your scenario, lets assume that the price of a single satoshi reached to $1. But can you actually send one satoshi to another address for any low value transaction? I believe not! The current network won't be able to handle this transaction, not even LN!

So for theory, we can keep dividing into decimals as bitcoin's price keeps on increasing, but sending such smaller transactions would become a real challenge! The network will be overburdened with transactions which will push the fees into next level. So you will end up paying fees which will be higher than the transaction value.

So we can have bitcoin shortage most certainly! But chance of happening it is pretty slim! Probably the entire market cap of bitcoin would have to reach few thousand trillions to see such incident, but it is nothing immune from happening!

[kryptqnick]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

That depends on the part Bitcoin will play and on the units we use. For now we are far from shortage, of course. However, if the population and with it the amount of money in the world grows with Bitcoin taking the bigger and bigger stake in it, we might arrive to problems. Let's say we are in the world where Bitcoin is legal tender, transactions and fees issues are somehow solved and we come to the point when 1 Satoshi is worth around $1. This means that there are now some things that should cost less (say, a chewing gum or a candy), but it cannot, because we don't have anything smaller than Satoshi. I went through some discussions on the possibility to break down Satoshi into smaller units, and it seems that it's impossible currently but might be possible through gradual changes. If it is, Bitcoin shortage will not happen. If it's not, it might theoretically.

[Artemis3]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

You could say its 21,000,000 bitcoins, but you could also say its  2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis. LN is already using 12 decimals instead of 8, but Bitcoin is ready to use 16 decimals should the need come.

I think in the future bitcoin value can keep going up, and it might come a time where a simple satoshi could buy coffee or such, then they would just extend the decimals. This is a deflationary coin, not only will there never be more than 21 million, but there are also coins that are lost forever, you will see because they are not moved in years, people losing their wallet/key etc.

The last bitcoin will be mined in 2140 and until that year bitcoin production will slow down, so the supply is slowly decreasing while the demand grows. But its ok, because it will start finding its value, kinda like gold did.

[mrdeposit]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

Yeah,it is possible to make trading based on short selling. Crypto trading platforms are not here only for long trading positions and Bitmex is known trading platform for this purpose. Demand increases with increasing prices and nowadays supply is more than demand IMHO.

[romero121]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

Yeah,it is possible to make trading based on short selling. Crypto trading platforms are not here only for long trading positions and Bitmex is known trading platform for this purpose. Demand increases with increasing prices and nowadays supply is more than demand IMHO.

Supply is more than the demand. When people know much about bitcoin we can see the market having a much increased number of users and decreased supply. This difference will create a large scale growth in marketcap as well with the price of bitcoin when the entire 21 million gets mined.

[TIDOVEE]

Bitcoin shortage?
Could you mean the currency per-se or the transaction?
Bitcoin cryptocurrency cannot go on shortage. I don't know if users can be more than the available currency.
But the tranction may be short, If the trading result as loss.

[Dreamchaser21]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

If every country make bitcoin legal, and the demand for bitcoin increases I still think its possible to have some shortages but not too much since many hodlers will sell their bitcoin to take some profit. The supply will not increase with bitcoin, but the demand continues to rise everyday so i think this is really possible in the future.

[magneto]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

Bitcoin's value is reflected solely through the price mechanism, because of the fact that it trades on the open market without any central entity to regulate its price movements.

When there is excess demand that can't be handled based on the supply, then the price will adjusted accordingly upwards. There won't ever be a stage where bitcoin is unusable because of low supply or high demand, because we can infinitely divide bitcoin into subunits of account. So no, a shortage is not possible, even if substantial amounts of coins got hacked, because bitcoin isn't a good - it can be divided and still used in the same way.

However, long term I do see adoption playing a big role in pushing aggregate demand for bitcoin, because after all you do need BTC to carry out transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. And that's a reason why I'm quite optimistic about the long term investment aspect of it as well.

[malikusama]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

I don't understand what do you mean by "shortage"?
May be you are referring to high demand, remember even if we lose more million of bitcoins the remaining bitcoins will become more valuable.
There are 100,000,000 satoshi in one bitcoin, if bitcoin become expensive enough in future due to low supply, we can deal in Satoshi and other smaller units like mBTC.

[pixie85]

There will be high demand but there will be no shortage especially after some more halvings when very little coins will be mined. When people start spending Bitcoin it will circulate like normal fiat money and go back to an exchange because some people will be unable to buy the things they need with it or some people will have to buy a local currency of a country where bitcoin acceptance is low. Traders will always keep some coins available on exchanges.

[franky1]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

do you know there are only 185,000 units of gold in the world.
i know crazy right.
185,000tonnes. thats it. end of

but gold can be split up into kg, grams
but gold can be split up into ounces

bitcoin can be split up into 'bits' and 'satoshi's'

its like pizza. you may order only 1 large pizza. but it is sliced up so that more than one person have have a piece of it

[X7]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

Bitcoin is divisible up to 100 million (100 million Satoshi's in one bitcoin)

It is unlikely we will reach a day where there is not enough Satoshi's to go around, It starts to scale quite drastically as the price per satoshi climbs by say for example, a dollar etc.

But if we reached that day, that would be a phenomenal problem to have for those who believed in the technology early

[rdbase]

I personally don’t think it would ever come to that point, since the value of bitcoin adjusts to satisfy the demand. I’d like to hear other opinions?

your question doesn't have anything to do with value of bitcoin or price.

shortage of bitcoin can only happen if there were more people wanting to have some amount of bitcoin but there weren't enough for them. for example this can happen if an extremely large number of coins were lost. the amount has to be huge though, something like 15 millions bitcoin lost! but that is highly unlikely to happen.
so we will continue to have a little less than the cap which is 21000000.00000000 bitcoin and that is enough for the world.

Some say the 21 million bitcoin limit is not set in stone. Like this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5116424.0
But as far as I know from the very beginning it does have a cap of 21 million, but will they all be claimed and circulated is a different story. There have been lost and theft of a portion of those 21 million bitcoins as you have mentioned.
With the law of supply and demand the price can not fall below a certain point from now on going forward.