If bitcoin ever goes mainstream

[runpaint]

All fiat is inflationary, and therefore it is worth less every year.

Fiat holders will lose anyway, regardless of what happens with Bitcoin.

[Trading]

The idea is simple: as more people adopt bitcoin, the price will keep going up and up on the long term (with short and median term major crashes). At some point, this is going to start to affect fiat value too.

I guess I more or less agree with this.  There is the question of what is meant by "adopt".  That is, someone might adopt bitcoin as a long-term investment savings, buying bitcoins and holding them for years.  Someone else might adopt bitcoin as a payment method for stuff they buy every month.  These two different types of adoption have different ramifications for bitcoin price, I think.

It seems generally accepted that holding or spending bitcoin are two forms of adoption of bitcoin with different impacts. If the buyer of things with bitcoin bought the bitcoins it seems the result is positive. He had to buy the bitcoins. The seller of the good might decide to keep the bitcoins. Even if the seller sells the bitcoins, the result will be at least neutral. Probably, the buyer of the goods will talk about his positive experience with bitcoin to others and will buy more bitcoins.
Of course, if someone buys bitcoins and holds them, that will be even more positive. It will decrease the number of bitcoins available, helping to make it scarce and, therefore, increasing the pressure for higher prices.
In a context of bitcoin's price increase, everyone buys bitcoin to hold and this helps the bullish momentum.

[BillyBobZorton]

There's a bit of a superiority complex building for those that do "get it" and have a vision to get outside of the govt created box of institutional slavery.

How can we help but feel superior? Looking around at a world of blinded slaves who believe they're free, and one can only feel pity, sadness, and compassion.

It will make us bitcoiners rich, but it will be at the expenses of fiat holders.

Love it, anyone to ignorant to not use btc now deserves to have their fiat devalued.

It's a bigger risk to hold fiat than BTC at this point, at least if you are Greek and in the future Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.. and we'll keep adding.

[mlferro]

All fiat is inflationary, and therefore it is worth less every year.

Fiat holders will lose anyway, regardless of what happens with Bitcoin.

this is true, I fully agree

[MegaHustlr]

If bitcoin goes mainstream , it will be fun.
Just imagine paying for everything via bitcoin , sounds too good

[txbtc]

It's important to remember the ideals behind this being the creation of a currency without central control rather than the production of profit.

[Amph]

it will end up with 50% money on bitcoin due to its deflationary nature, and the rest will remain on fiat, decreasing its inflationary situation by the other 50%

[Trading]

The European Central Bank, as previously, the Bank of England, recognized in a recent report that bitcoin has the potential to disrupt its monetary policy: http://www.coindesk.com/european-central-bank-digital-currencies-inherently-unstable/

[vrm86]

It would be interesting to see how whole global economy is competing for only 21millions Bitcoins (minus 1 million that belongs to Satoshi ). In that case predictions of monetary value of Bitcoin many times higher than now sound logical.

[Daniel91]

If this happen, I'm sure that value of BTC will increase a lot, what will bring great profits to many early users.
Of course, it will be great to be able to use bitcoin anywhere instead of local money.
Still this is distant future.

[Denker]

If this happen, I'm sure that value of BTC will increase a lot, what will bring great profits to many early users.
Of course, it will be great to be able to use bitcoin anywhere instead of local money.
Still this is distant future.

If things work out fine and infrastructure, ecosystem keeps growing, more and more businesses are build around and on top of Bitcoin,accept and work with BTC I believe in 8-10 years we will see a big portion of this distant future. So many things are able we might not be able to think about right now except visionaries.
So be positive, use and demonstrate to others how BTC works, cross fingers and I'm sure we can make it.

[tspacepilot]

One question is what is at what level do you say "ok mainstream has been achieved".  For example, someone pointed out to me earlier that apparently GNU/Linux is now used on more than 1% of desktops.  I remember when GNU/Linux was closer to 1 in 1000.  Nowadays everyone has heard of linux and I would tend to say that this is "mainstream".  However, at 1%, it's certainly not majority.  So, does mainstream mean majority or does mainstream simply mean significant minority or something else?

[calme]

BTC is already minestream.

[MUCHSIN]

we wouldnt know if its bad or not if we're not still on the mainstream stage.

Let us just cross the bridge when we get there.

[Daniel91]

If this happen, I'm sure that value of BTC will increase a lot, what will bring great profits to many early users.
Of course, it will be great to be able to use bitcoin anywhere instead of local money.
Still this is distant future.

If things work out fine and infrastructure, ecosystem keeps growing, more and more businesses are build around and on top of Bitcoin,accept and work with BTC I believe in 8-10 years we will see a big portion of this distant future. So many things are able we might not be able to think about right now except visionaries.
So be positive, use and demonstrate to others how BTC works, cross fingers and I'm sure we can make it.

I hope you are right and that we will see some ''big'' changes in bitcoin world soon.
and yes, don't worry, I'm still positive and optimistic about future of BTC, maybe more realistic
 

[Trading]

I left the notion of mainstream intentionally ambiguous. Because it's hard to define.

One can use different criteria.

1) A percentage of the amount of the total expenses on one year. But even 1% would be huge and would imply a very high price for bitcoin. However, according to the mentioned Gresham's Law, bitcoin will be hoarded and only rarely spent. It's like gold. Gold is part of mainstream, but people don't exchange it much, they prefer to keep it. On the main functions of money: mean of exchange, unit of account and reserve of value, I think the last will be bitcoin's main function. It won't be used much as unit of value, because of its volatility (many places that accept bitcoin, prefer to announce the prices in USDs). It won't be used a lot as mean of payment, because people will rarely spend it.

2) Accessibility: the fact that anyone can easily buy, sell and pay with bitcoin. Clearly, this is decisive. If we could exchange and spend bitcoins on the majority of ATM and retailers, we might be able to say that bitcoin is mainstream. But imagine that even in these conditions bitcoin kept being scarcely used, with small demand.  It wouldn't be mainstream. Many physical businesses complain they never had customers paying with bitcoin. So, this is a necessary condition, but it isn't enough.

3) A percentage of people owning it. This seems to be a good criterion. But it isn't easy to establish a number: 10% seems enough, but not 1% or even 5%. 70 million users on the all world would be great, but not enough for talking about mainstream. I guess only at 10% we would start to see unfold the problems above mentioned. But this kind of projections is hard to make.

Think about Paypal (I hate it, but let's use it as example). Is Paypal mainstream? I don't think so. It had a volume of transactions of only 180 billion on 2013, about 150 million active registered accounts and in many countries you can use it as mean of payment only on a few places. So, it reached about 2% of world population.

Bitcoin had about 23 billion USDs in trade volume alone during the last 12 months (see http://www.bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=6m, at current price) and maybe 1 or 2 million active users. It still has a long way to go.

[Trading]

In a report published last month, the Australian Treasury states that "Similarly, financial markets are increasingly globally integrated, and the international flow of
capital has become less restricted and more mobile. Technology has also allowed new business models to evolve that have substantially changed the way businesses and
consumers interact. New ways of transacting, including crypto-currencies such as bitcoin, were not contemplated when the current tax system was designed.
These developments make determining the appropriate tax outcome for a particular company in a specific country difficult and raise concerns about the ability of companies to relocate profits to minimise their tax." (see http://bettertax.gov.au/files/2015/03/TWP_combined-online.pdf).

I think this is an underestimation. It's not only corporations that can use bitcoin for tax evasion. Even if big corporations can try to use bitcoin to avoid paying huge amounts of money, massive fiscal evasion from individuals is also a big threat. Mainly because individuals are not subject to the same degree of control that big corporations are.

[Trading]

This statement "merchants have been "widely disappointed by the number of transactions they see in bitcoin" (Slide 50). According to the report, mainstream users simply don't have a compelling reason to try a volatile currency over its alternatives, yet. This sentiment is echoed by that fact that the growth rate of new bitcoin-accepting merchants is declining (Slide 47), continuing the downward trend from previous State of Bitcoin reports." (see http://www.coindesk.com/5-facts-coindesks-state-bitcoin-report-q1-2015/) confirms what I wrote about how much bitcoin still have to go on the mainstream road.

Anyway, much of the somehow low trending interest on bitcoin is motivated by the downtrend of its price. I'm expecting this trend to continue for some time more. But watch out for the reversal.

[ensurance982]

This statement "merchants have been "widely disappointed by the number of transactions they see in bitcoin" (Slide 50). According to the report, mainstream users simply don't have a compelling reason to try a volatile currency over its alternatives, yet. This sentiment is echoed by that fact that the growth rate of new bitcoin-accepting merchants is declining (Slide 47), continuing the downward trend from previous State of Bitcoin reports." (see http://www.coindesk.com/5-facts-coindesks-state-bitcoin-report-q1-2015/) confirms what I wrote about how much bitcoin still have to go on the mainstream road.

Anyway, much of the somehow low trending interest on bitcoin is motivated by the downtrend of its price. I'm expecting this trend to continue for some time more. But watch out for the reversal.

Yeah, the downtrend is having a huge influence on Bitcoins adoption, that's a given. But I also believe Bitcoin's usability as a currency to pay for things in brick-and-mortar stores is highly limited, actually. Online transactions,... maybe... But paying for your coffee using BTC? Nah...

[NUFCrichard]

I disagree that Bitcoin increasing in value decreases the value of fiat.
If I can buy a house for $150k now and in the future I can still buy a house for $150k, but instead of being 680BTC it only costs 20BTC, the fiat owners haven't lost a thing, but the Bitcoin holders have gained.

I live in Germany, and the euro has weakened recently.  I haven't become poorer (unless I go on holiday) as prices stay the same and everything is priced in €.  The same will be true with other fiat currencies.