Could 1 satoshi become worth $1?

[gentlemand]

Anyone who has one Satoshi could sell it for a dollar this afternoon. All we need now is to find an escrow and this thread is fulfilled.

[KaChingCoinDev]

Anyone who has one Satoshi could sell it for a dollar this afternoon. All we need now is to find an escrow and this thread is fulfilled.

Good idea! Here is my post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=986653.0

[1Referee]

If 1 sat happens to be worth $1 at a certain date, then I need to do everything to find my old wallet files that I probably deleted.

They contain like 1k-200k sat each But I'm glad I will not need to do so.

[futureofbitcoin]

If 1 sat happens to be worth $1 at a certain date, then I need to do everything to find my old wallet files that I probably deleted.

They contain like 1k-200k sat each But I'm glad I will not need to do so.

If that time comes, you still won't need to find your 1k Satoshi wallets, just as you won't waste time trying to find a lost penny now. Or 1/100th of a penny.

[Wardrick]

I read somewhere that if all the currencies around the world (USD,GBP,Euro, Peso, ect) were to be combined and Bitcoin was given the same value as that, then one Satoshi would equal around .02 cents. So no, I don't think one satoshi will ever be worth $1.00

[Denker]

I read somewhere that if all the currencies around the world (USD,GBP,Euro, Peso, ect) were to be combined and Bitcoin was given the same value as that, then one Satoshi would equal around .02 cents. So no, I don't think one satoshi will ever be worth $1.00

Yes you're almost right.It's approximately 35 trillion (10^12). So this would be 0,0166666 cents for 1 Satoshi.

[Biodom]

I read somewhere that if all the currencies around the world (USD,GBP,Euro, Peso, ect) were to be combined and Bitcoin was given the same value as that, then one Satoshi would equal around .02 cents. So no, I don't think one satoshi will ever be worth $1.00

why only count currencies and not assets valuation?
i think assets are into hundreds of trillions
Total GDP is 30 tril/year
Total Earth value is apparently at least 1.95x10¹⁷ or 195 quadrillions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_Earth
total number of satoshis=2.1 quadrillions
so, value of BTC at sat=$1 will be 1% of Earth value

One can also possibly imagine in >200 years, people forming sidechains (to remove btc permanently from earth-based blockchain) to buy things on other planets (blockchain info cannot be readily synced with planets light years away)

[Raystonn]

You folks are thinking 3-dimensionally.  Add in the next dimension, time.  Take a look at historical monetary supply charts.  Take a look at historical global GDP charts.  Look at the historical gross world product.  These things grow at an exponential rate.  Assuming the USD doesn't disappear entirely, or completely change in nature (e.g. cryptographic fixed-supply USD), a $1 satoshi is a mathematical certainty.  The question is only: when?

[dinofelis]

why only count currencies and not assets valuation?

Because in order for bitcoin to take their value, they should loose their value of course.

If bitcoin is to take the value of all M2 monetary mass in fiat, then all that fiat will loose its value (to bitcoin).  That's not entirely unthinkable (but almost so).  However, if bitcoin is going to take also the value of your house, then your house would have no value any more !

Money is of course always a subset of all assets, because its purpose is to exchange it against the other assets.  And many of these other assets have a lower "velocity" than money.  You don't trade your house every 6 months, do you ?  

If you'd consider the "market cap" of bitcoin equal to "all that has value", then nothing else would have value (and immediately, bitcoin, which has no other use than store of value, would loose it entirely, because it can only serve to be exchanged against something else).

That most or all fiat would loose its value to crypto currencies, I could eventually accept conceptually.  However, that all fiat would loose its value to BITCOIN, is unthinkable, simply because the number of fiat tranactions runs in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, and bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second.

[Somekindabitcoin]

By the time a satoshi becomes a dollar, the USD would be worthless leading to a price that high. That's the only thing I can see.

[Amph]

fee would be not that high, compared to the fact that everyone will be rich already, because even holding 0.01 will mean millionaire

[waterpile]

If it turns to $1 i would be freaking rich even holding with 80k sat but it seems impossible to happen.

[mladen00]

no, satoshi knows that real price for 1 sat is 1 cent

[Nrcewker]

it may be, after many years

[Shiver]

why only count currencies and not assets valuation?

If you'd consider the "market cap" of bitcoin equal to "all that has value", then nothing else would have value (and immediately, bitcoin, which has no other use than store of value, would loose it entirely, because it can only serve to be exchanged against something else).

This part I can't get my head around.  If a 'currency' is a measure of an actual asset (swerving the money as debt issue) rather than the asset itself (meaning that you don't include money as part of 'all that has value' but rather, a proxy of something that has value), then it would surely mean that comparing satoshi to USD would become meaningless since it would have become its replacement, but comparing it to a house would still stand.  After all, aren't we valuing houses with USD right now?  It's just the measuring stick that changes.

For the Satoshi = 1USD scenario, I can't see it as even remotely likely, but if it were to happen, we could just add another byte onto the protocol and get 8 more decimal places.  Sure it would be a hard fork, but that's not as negative as it could sound.  It's not like people would be losing something by conforming to consensus, and could be planned well in advance.  I mean they managed to pull of the switch over to Euro (crazy as that was), and that did mean people started rounding up prices for ease of mental comfort, but adding decimal places rather than changing the measuring stick would be a walk in the park by comparison.

[dinofelis]

This part I can't get my head around.  If a 'currency' is a measure of an actual asset (swerving the money as debt issue) rather than the asset itself (meaning that you don't include money as part of 'all that has value' but rather, a proxy of something that has value), then it would surely mean that comparing satoshi to USD would become meaningless since it would have become its replacement, but comparing it to a house would still stand.  After all, aren't we valuing houses with USD right now?  It's just the measuring stick that changes.

You can value a house with the measure stick "dollar" or BTC, but that doesn't mean that the market cap of actually existing dollars include that value of course.

You can also measure the value of your house in apples or eggs or loaves of bread.  Anything that has a certain value, can be used as a "measure stick" for anything else that has value.  A currency is no exception to that.  This essentially comes about because of the transitivity of prices: if asset A is worth x times asset B (that is, if on the free market, you can trade A for x times B or vice versa), and if asset B is worth y times asset C (that is, if on the free market, you can trade B for y times C), then: asset A will be worth xy times asset C. 

Because if it weren't, by going in circles you could get an arbitrary amount of value (arbitrage).

Of course, this is assuming totally liquid markets, which in reality they aren't, so transitivity of prices is only approximatively true.
But that means that you can measure anything against anything else.

Mind you, because markets are dynamical, prices change all the time, exchange rates change all the time.  Transitivity is valid, but only if you take all prices (exchange rates) at the same moment.  Tomorrow, the values of the coefficients x and y will be different, but a priori, transitivity will still hold with these new values.

So a "measure stick" of value can be any asset. 

And now you see why using a measure stick doesn't mean anything for the market cap of the asset you use as a yard stick.

You could just as well measure the value of your house in eggs, but that doesn't mean that the market cap of all eggs in the world include all houses.

[innocent93]

This is not gonna happen unless all governments/countries on the earth claim Bitcoin is only legal currency, but it did seem unlikely, we got enough unequal distribution.

[zetaray]

1 satoshi will never worth $1. Everyone will dump their bitcoin before that happens. I know I would. Look at the charts, $1000 for 1btc is a stretch, $10000 is fairly tale.

[ajareselde]

If (and by the time) that happens, i believe bitcoin will be openly accepted and dominating the world market, which means that there will be no problems in
using it at merchants even for smaller transactions.

For example; you buy a gum thats 0,5$, and pay with 1 satoshi (since its a minimum), and the merchant returns you 0,5$ change.
That wasnt do hard now was it? For every problem theres a solution, and having a good development team, even the unsolvable problems can be solved with changing certain parts of bitcoin,
even tho that would mean having to fork it.

cheers

[johnyj]

That's totally possible if bitcoin were just used for store of retirement fund alone, not even mention other usage

The world population is increasing at 370K per day, and bitcoin net supply on market is about 5000 coins, that gives each person 1,350,000 satoshi to use to store his retirement fund, if that fund is 1,350,000 dollar, which is a decent amount in today's standard, but might not be a big deal in 20 years after continuously inflation of USD, then 1 satoshi will equal 1 dollar

Another way to calculate is use MV=PQ formula, where M is 2100 trillion satoshi, V is 0.05 e.g. money saved for use every 20 years, and Q is world GDP at 72 trillion USD, then you get a P of 1.45 satoshi per USD, more or less in the same magnitude

Money in retirement funds have the slowest move speed thus impact the money supply in the most significant way, other usages like daily trading or monthly spending does not have the same effect on money supply

I just discussed the effect of mirroring the economy into bitcoin by passing all the transactions through it

An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollars
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=987110.0

But in that case V will be more than 12 (monthly turnover), then the effect on P is very limited, 100 satoshi for a USD is enough to deal with the world GDP

And suppose that some day bitcoin becomes some kind of world reserve fund, and will be stored for more than 70 years for some countries, then it will give it an even larger push