How many people should get rich and how much is rich?

[Snipe85]

So if Bitcoin goes to $1000 or $10000 and the dollar collapses at the same time all you'll be able to buy for $100 will be a burger. What then? will you feel rich owning a 10BTC, worth $1000? 
From a different perspective if bitcoin goes mainstream all of us that own coins right now will be relatively rich.

[gollum]

Being rich by hoarding USDollars or bitcoins is just an illusion: the real wealth is in the goods and services that are produced and exchanged in the economy.

I believe a lot in the sharing economy (apartments, car pools etc) as a way of using resources efficiently, in the optimal sharing economy you don't even need to have money to participate in the sharing economy. Instead you just have a good rating in a web of trust and people trust that you will contribute to the economy later on. Bitcoin would work as the public ledger in such economy, and hoarding bitcoins would not be necessary. The richness will instead be measured by your contribution to the sharing economy.

[futureofbitcoin]

In 3 pages, not a single person answered the question in the title. Even if wealth is relative and money isn't everything and all that, I think we can still give a straight forward answer that actually attempts to answer the question, however outrageous and wrong it may be.

I'll start:

If bitcoin really is the "next big thing" after the internet, my guess is within 5-10 years, we'll have:

Tier 1:
100-200 people at 100M+

Tier 2:
1000-2000 people at 10M-100M

Tier 3:
5000-20000 people at 1M-10M

This is their wealth GAINED purely from crypto related projects, like companies, coins and whatever else. So if Bill Gates bought 5M worth of bitcoins and it grew to 6M, he's tier 3. If Warren Buffet then bought 100M worth of bitcoins and it dropped to 50M, he wouldn't be in any of those tiers.

Also, my values are based on the present purchasing power of USD in America.

How many bitcoins are required to reach that level? Well, there are currently 106 addresses with 10,000 bitcoins or more, and another 1445 with 1,000 or more. Assuming Satoshi has 300k-1M coins (lower and upperbound estimates I've read here), even if all of those are in the richest addresses, he would take up the top 11 addresses. Then there are people like the winklevii, Roger Ver, etc. I doubt they'd use 100,000 addresses, 1 for each bitcoin. So chances are, a good number of the 1,000+ addresses are theirs.

Of course, a lot of people can also earn a lot of money from crypto businesses/alt coins without owning a lot of bitcoins themselves.

My guess is that potentially everyone with over 5000 bitcoins may be in tier 1, those with more than 500 will at least be in tier 2, and you may become a millionaire if you buy 50 bitcoins today.



Extremely optimistic? Probably, but hey, why not?

[Herbert2020]

Anyways, how many people should be able to get rich off bitcoin. Is there a limit of how many and or when bitcoiner's can get rich.
should??
only wise people and people with experience get rich off of anything. not people who want to get rich quick in one night.

Does it matter if bitcoin's price is $1 $50 $100 $250 $300 $350, $1265, $2000, $5000?
it matters a little. if the price is say $10000 the early adoptors or people who bought at lowest price and held for long will get rich but others will profit from every rise and fall

[LordSonjai]

shut up! everyone shut up bitcoin has dropped like 35 bucks

[Q7]

For me, I don't see or worry about the subject of getting rich. What is more important is that whatever fiat money that I have right now should still hold the same value or worth some day in the future. That is my bitcoin still retains the same value compared to fiat which is actually losing its worth.

[bf4btc]

shut up! everyone shut up bitcoin has dropped like 35 bucks

Oh dear the lord did not see that coming no?

This is the cycle of life my friend it will increase and it will decrease the trick is understanding this and then playing the game as best as you can.

Bitcoin has made many people rich and will continue to do so but these are people that are pro active and go getters they did not just buy a coin or 2 and expect to get rich they done something about it, investing, trading, creating,working.

Only those who deserve to be rich will become rich.

[runpaint]

Rich?

I have more than the Kings of England could have imagined 100-200 years ago.  Fruit and vegetables out of season.  Go from London to Paris in a couple of hours.  Antibiotics.  Cell phone, with camera.

I have never missed a meal.

As Bob Marley said: Now that you got what you want, don't you want more.

I often say the same thing.  No king could listen to 12 different orchestras per hour, 24 hours a day, for free.  We can.  

Did you know there was a President of the United States who was killed by cherries with human feces on them?  That was the best in the world.  And what was the best medicine in the world, for the President?  The doctors gave him opium, to stop the diarrhea, and then maybe they cut open his veins for the healing powers of bloodletting.

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/02/the-bug-that-poisoned-the-president/#.VPhNNPnF_A0

[Monetizer]

You can get rich with bitcoin without even having a single bitcoin, personally however I think many people's main aims are to become financially stable with the help of investments through bitcoin.

[juju]

Is there no carrying capacity of bitcoin? Unlike that of a petri dish.


Anyways, how many people should be able to get rich off bitcoin. Is there a limit of how many and or when bitcoiner's can get rich.

There is something about bitcoin that seems it could be a major economic driver with its frictionless abilities.


Does it matter if bitcoin's price is $1 $50 $100 $250 $300 $350, $1265, $2000, $5000?

How is that bankers have not been able to think of this… Perhaps they have but would dare go near it for it destroys their model, Why can't i simply send dollars or any arbitrary value measure, via any sort of technology medium that can also perhaps create a network, like effect..hmmm..

What your discussing is the value of the Utility of Bitcoin, you can send 21 Million dollars @ 1 Dollar a coin with 21 Million coins, or 1 Coin @ 21 Million USD a coin whats the difference? Since we have a finite amount of Bitcoin, depending on the number of uses of Bitcoin, number of actors actively using Bitcoin, and currently available coins will determine the market price of the coin. It matters to some degree because if it is only 1 dollar a coin, the maximum value the Bitcoin network could secure is only worth 21 Million USD. I am unsure what is a reasonable amount of wealth is typically stored in one type of currency, upwards of Trillions of USD of wealth I would guess. (Now imagine their are over ~50 currencies like this)


I digress from your point about friction, rich is a really relative term much like Intelligence. I would argue that anyone who spends enough time with Bitcoin's Technology becomes rich just from trying to understand how things work.

Based on crude values in my head, if we had some sort of Full worldwide adoption (Not possible in my mind), I would say that less than 10,000,000 Bitcoin Users would be considered "rich" in a monetary sense by today's standards. In 2012 their were ~5 Million Millionaires in the United States alone, with ~10+ Million Millionaires world wide. Can't be more than 10 Million, in my mind and would certainly be much more than 100,000 users. 1/700 of the users of Bitcoin in the world are Rich by that crude math. In reality it might be worth nothing or more than we can hope for -shrugs-