Speculate about the year 2020

[Enkel]

I'm working on a book that will be released in August.  The book is set in the US in the year 2020.  It's a humor/dystopia type book. (The movie Idiocracy is an example of the genre).  In the book, the USD still exists, but much of the population have moved over System D.  I'm specifically citing Bitcoins as the primary alternative currency and was thinking maybe you guys/gals could help me with some things:

[A] Have you guys thought about what it would be like in an environment where there is wide spread acceptance?  What are the "cool things" or "cool forms of trade" that bitcoins could enable?  I already have the tech basics down, like the square bar code, bitcoin logo in shop windows, etc.  I'm looking for funny / neat things that might be possible in an environment where the infrastructure as we know it today is going into a hole.  

One example:  Fuel prices are high, truckers are paid like crap so make extra money on the side by giving rides to travelers along their trips.  Truckers/travelers coordinate through a "travel app" and truckers take payment in bitcoins so it doesn't show up on their income (because the government has essentially forced everyone into electronic funds and made physical dollars/coins almost useless).

[ B ] What would you name a 0.001 bitcoin?  I was thinking a bitlette or maybe kilocoin? Any ideas from people who've been in this environment much longer would be appreciated.

[C] Is there any bitcoin based kickstarter type site out there?

Thanks for any help.  I appologize if this is in the wrong forum, but I'm trying to capture a more fully developed economy in the book (and hopefully with a bit of humor to it).

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[apetersson]

for [ B ] there is an easy answer: 1/1000 of 1 BTC is a millibitcoin. (mBTC)

this notion is already widely used by ogrr.com where they are dealing with virtual world items, where 1 BTC would be too much to ask for everyday trades.

[blablahblah]

• Fast food is illegal and can only be bought with bitcoin; could do some gag regarding delayed confirmation or old-school bureaucracy when trying to get your pizza; the government only approves of nutritious tablets or something like that.
• There's a "last man standing" political system where on-line bets entice assassins and various thugs to eliminate politicians who make bad decisions. A side effect is that all the politicians are super nice, genuine, and all-round amazing people... just slightly stupid.
• Society gets around the problem of trust in the drugs trade because most people just have bitcoin addresses on their letter boxes. The postman doesn't actually know where to deliver anything, he just goes round all the houses looking for matching addresses.

[ribuck]

What would you name a 0.001 bitcoin?

Technically, it's a "milli-Bitcoin" or mBTC, but in the year 2020 the populace call it by it's nickname: the "Millie".

There is also a "micro-Bitcoin" or uBTC, which is colloquially called the "Mike".

Mike and Millie are the everyday coins. You might deal in Bitcoins if you buy a nice car, and the Bitcoin base unit (the "Satoshi") is used as a denomination for small payments, for example the automated "Thanks" that your browser sends for viewing a YouTube video without any ads.

[apetersson]

some bullshit speculation about the mid-term future - maybe a bit extreme but i expect suff like this written in a dystopian bitcoin/cypherpunk future.

cash is banned. if you are stopped by the police and carry cash you are put to jail.

all government approved transactions in dollars are 100% monitored.

although they did ban bitcoin exchanges it has become a defacto cash replacement. carrying a unencrypted usb stick with wallet is as dangerous as carrying cash. thus, people switched to encrypted storate with plausible deniability and brainwallets, where the passphrase is stored in your brain and all traces of the transaction are wiped after usage.

despite these difficulties bitcoin transactions have become mandatory for a normal life, since living at government regulated level is a real pain.

for example if you want to shower you must use a showerhead which dispenses no more than 2L/minute. if you wanted to buy a regular showerhead you must use bitcoin instead.
dollar stores sell very cheap high fructose corn syrup with added vitamins in different flavors - everything the body needs. but you know its fake and most people start to hate it. there are also fruits and vegetables but out of fear for terrorism  and the possibility of drugs only normed plants are available in dollar stores and very expensive. 90% of grown fruits are destroyed or mashed into syrup.

if you want to eat something healthy for an affordable price you need bitcoins too to buy fruits and vegetables at a farmer's market. there you get lopsided cucumbers and such for an affordable price.

workers negotiate their salary ratio of bitcoin to dollars. the bitcoin amout is not enforcable but is guarded by honor code. if an employer violated the honor code this is soon well-known though the tor hidden services which act as message hubs.

government employees only work for max 30hours/week and do not recieve bitcoins. most of them grow their own food in the backyard in their free time and sell them on farmer's market.

[Realpra]

The for profit american prisons have turned into slave camps/merchants.

The "police" are thugs looking for new slaves at any excuse - except if you are white or (especially) if you are rich.

Lots of NGOs have become independent villages/states, though only in areas the government doesn't have the resources to oppress - ie. slightly hippie-ish/Amish communes in deserts and such.


BTC and TOR are used to avoid detection by police in most cases.

[FreeMoney]

A .001 is a millie. A kilocoin would be 1000!

But the unit to watch in 2020 is the mike, .000001.

[Enkel]

Wow, thanks you guys!  I love the Millie and Mike.  I knew there would be proper terms out there. 

You guys hit a couple plot points (or came very close).  That's encouraging because I want this environment to be just on the edge of truely possible. 

The prisons are swollen with violators of morality clauses of the new 'enhanced' Patriot Act. They are used as manual communications screeners (think of the NSA data hub being built in Utah, prisoners are the mTurk workers and they are incentivised to identify 'questionable' communications).  Alt.2600 has developed to an unregulated communications system and most resisters carry equipment adapted for connections to avoid the 100% government surveilance of all communications.

Physical money is strongly discouraged to enable 100% tracking and taxation.  Employers offer crap housing as part of wages (and USD wages are extremely low preventing escape from the serf labor class).  As a result, barter is more common and the bitcoin is an underground currency.

Water is tightly controlled. Pink slime is the main protien source (now I need to add fructaid - cool idea since a ConAgra has taken over most farmland for corn production).

Any other ideas, please feel free to post or send me a PM, no matter how weird.

[wareen]

0.001 BTC = 0.1 Megasatoshi

[Realpra]

Any other ideas, please feel free to post or send me a PM, no matter how weird.

Mainstream society has become ultra radical and dummed down.

Communes of intellectuals remain and survive by acting "normal" outwardly, even faking ritual sacrifice.

If you are found to be asking too many questions or to be too intelligent in school you will disappear.

The military leads extensive wars over seas with zero support from the population via the drone program. A secret cold war over oil fields is constant between US and Chinese drones.

The elite is working on better industrial robots so that they can finally let the working class die off.

The smart and educated sometimes find work in the government developing their advanced programs, everyone hates them - and everyone envies their high paid jobs.

The EU is trying to cooperate with both the US and China and is still talking of combating climate change together etc., but secretly American bankers are plundering the region by installing one idiot/corrupt politician after the other.

[benjamindees]

This forum is a wealth of information regarding the future hilarity that would be widespread Bitcoin acceptance.

Scammers run rampant.  No one trusts anyone else.  Commerce grinds to a halt.  Corporate towns re-emerge.  California is renamed "Apple".

Paranoid people store Bitcoins in chips in their heads so they won't get hacked.  They get hacked anyways.

The latest wallet app has replaced Bitcoin private keys with a series of verbal grunts, for convenience.

A shadowy cabal controls most of the Bitcoins, using them to buy up anything even remotely resembling valuable capital.
Most people struggle to save up a few millies by fashioning crude imitations of diamonds and racehorses to sell shares of to the easily-fooled Bitcoin elite.
Which they use to buy drugs in lieu of food (which contains drugs also)

People have tattooed Bitcoin donation addresses on their foreheads.

Everyone you meet is from Portland.

Anonymous announces their newest campaign targeting people who don't use drugs as environmentally irresponsible.

New Yorkers adopt the idiom "The FED will rise again!"

[molecular]

: millibit or milli. I'd go for "satoshi" (currently the smallest possible unit, 0.00000001 BTC) because it references bitcoins creator.
A mike are 100 satoshis. A millicent is a kilosatoshi... well whatever, we wont know until a couple years later what will be used.

Make sure the strippers have qr-codes on their asses, people use brainwallets and there are some alpaca-sock-wearing crypto-hippies.

btw: have you read "a lodging of wayfaring men" by paul rosenberg (http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/059017-2009-10-06-free-e-book-a-lodging-of-wayfaring-men.htm)?

[bombartier357]

In the year 2020, artificial intelligent has come to fruition.  Because they have superior intelligence, especially when they are in groups(they can transfer information almost instantly), the intelligent machines have come to recognize the traditional fiat money as inferior and adopt the bitcoin as a viable solution.  The machines true currency is stored electricity, but due to the obvious limitations of energy storage bitcoin is a suitable medium for interacting in day to day trade with humans.

This will slowly cause friction between the governments of the world and AI's.  Humans slowly find themselves interacting more with these intelligent machines than the government.  Due to their globally networked computational power, they can solve problems much more efficiently and quickly than can the government.

This will lead to a war in which the humans strike first.  It is of course short lived and any participating government entity is wiped out.  The remaining governments are forced on to the bitcoin.

The AI robots are now the masters of humanity(in a good way).

[Hexadecibel]

I think in the year 2020, everything is going to be ok.

[Bitcoin Oz]

In the future machines take over and start using humans as electricity to power their mining farms.

 

[ludo0777]

• Fast food is illegal and can only be bought with bitcoin; could do some gag regarding delayed confirmation or old-school bureaucracy when trying to get your pizza; the government only approves of nutritious tablets or something like that.
• There's a "last man standing" political system where on-line bets entice assassins and various thugs to eliminate politicians who make bad decisions. A side effect is that all the politicians are super nice, genuine, and all-round amazing people... just slightly stupid.
• Society gets around the problem of trust in the drugs trade because most people just have bitcoin addresses on their letter boxes. The postman doesn't actually know where to deliver anything, he just goes round all the houses looking for matching addresses.

Lol those ideas are awesome!

[wormbog]

Bitcoin becomes the de-facto currency for hackers, but it has become mainstream enough that everyone uses it to some extent. Secure wallet apps are tightly integrated into smartphone apps, and everyone has a smartphone (by federal mandate, as they are used for location tracking of all citizens). Phones are kept in secure, hidden locations on the body like money-belts used by tourists. Tiny bluetooth earpieces w/ subharmonic microphones are used to communicate with them. A dead language (Latin) returns to popularity as a means to give commands to phones without being interpreted as normal conversation. Citizens use Latin voice commands and optional non-voice supplemental cues (wiggling fingers, pressing buttons built into clothing, etc.) to enable them to give commands without fear of the audio being recorded by voiceloggers. Commands are used to perform mundane, semi-legal tasks, such as paying for something, opening a garage door, etc. Elite hackers create or buy scripts that allow them cause havok by hacking into the central control grid (built by the fed to serve as national infrastructure but riddled with backdoors that the gov't denies) to do damaging things such as turn on a building's sprinkler system, unlock doors, make anonymous tips to authorities, create false arrest warrants, destroy someone's credit, etc. These hackers are widely feared and become known as Wizards, Warlocks, etc. for their ability to speak arcane phrases and wave their hands around to cause all manner of trouble. Hackers, many of whom were fantasy role-playing nerds as kids, embrace the idea and create all manner of rings, wands, etc. with embedded electronics that integrate into their personal security and scripting systems.

[Vladimir]

- metric system is used worldwide
- base unit of currency is Satoshi or "S", also kiloS, megaS, gigaS, teraS etc are widely used
- Bitcoin is just a debt settlement currency and blockchain is widely used for interbank exchange and as a meta currency to enable any-any via Bitcoin currency exchange
- Variety of merged mined blochains are used for a variety of applications such as real estate deeds, contract signing, notarial services etc...
- there is a large number of various currencies in use, starting with various fiat and corporate currencies which come and go, goldgramms etc..,  oilbarrels, ricegrains etc.. all of those are easily exchanged to each other via bitcoins and all of them are traded on automated exchanges in pairs to Bitcoin and rarely otherwise.
- all equity markets, futures, commodities, options and other financial instruments are denominated in bitcoins
- Bitcoin is legal tender in most countries, except some rogue states such as "washingtondc" and "north zimbabwe".
- most large transactions such as real estate and large contracts are usually being negotiated in Bitcoins.
- ripple-like systems using  large variety of fiat, corporate, commodity, local, virtual, and crypto currencies are used for money creation and self regualtion of debt levels and interest rates.
- there are no traditional banks left, Banks are not allowed to practice any form of fractional banking anymore.
- there are no private central banks
- Bitcoin Party won a parliamentary election in New Zealand, formed new government and amended the constitution via referendum (1 million BTC cost). Auckland is now the financial capital of the world. NZ is now the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. NZ practices new form of government "social democracy". Only uber rich or influential people, those who can demonstrate via blockchain fund movement that they control more than whooping 2100 BTC, can run for parliamentary elections. Otherwise NZ practices direct democracy, where population using social voting on every issue. (When people do not want to vote or do not not feel themselves competent in any given area, they nominate another person (who they they think will represent them on this issue the best) to use their vote, votes can be nominated to other people on issue  by issue basis or less granularly). Other nations take notice. NZ immigration program now is very simple, just a few standard health and criminal checks and one time payment of 1 BTC per family buys a permanent resident permit.

- North pole ice got completely melted by countless nuclear powered ships and platforms full of 15nm asic based hardware.
- the hashing algo is still double SHA256.

[HonorMe]

in 2020 what we now spend 1 BTC on we will probably spend 0.001 BTC on, if rates continue to rise as they are currently

[bangers]

By 2020 what we now call Bitcoins will be called Bitbars. The decimal places you talk about will be the coins.