4 ms·

“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.

by Siira 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago
The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time. Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  That's assuming that BTC's aren't infinitely divisible. Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Therefore, it's unlikely that there will ever be zero bitcoins.
  - noch 5y ago
    > Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.
    - ur-whale 5y ago
      > Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. True, it'd be a hard fork. However, I don't believe hard forks are impossible if managed properly. The taproot upgrade (not a hard fork, I know) was rather uncontroversial and accepted rather easily. I suspect a hard fork allowing for - say - bitcoin amounts encoded in 64 bits would not necessarily generate the kind of upheaval the blocksize wars did. And, hopefully, even for controversial upgrades, the lessons of said wars will have been learnt and the process of upgrading Bitcoin can be done in a slightly more reasonable / orderly fashion.
  - xtracto 5y ago
    This is something not so many people take into account regarding cryptocurrencies. The real "total number" of any cryptocurrency is the total number of decimals they contain. There are currently a total of 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis. A satoshi is $0.00059 USD. A Satoshi could cost $0.01 (1 cent) and it could still be paired with the US economy. If 99% of Satoshis became unavailable, we would still have 21,000,000,000,000 of Satoshis in circulation.
  - spiralx 5y ago
    Whether you cut a pie into 10 million slices or 10 billion slices you still only have one pie in total in the same way that changing ten dimes for a hundred cents still means you have a dollar. In a world where only 1,000,000 BTC remain in circulation if one person owns 500,000 of them means he controls half of the total value of BTC and that everyone else's coins will add up to the other 500,000 BTC, and being able to divide the each BTC into smaller and smaller amounts doesn't change that fact. Whether we can divide 500,000 BTC into 50 trillion Satoshis or 5 quadrillion "New Satoshis" worth 1e-10 BTC each doesn't make new wealth appear.
worrycue 5y ago
It’s called a deflationary spiral. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp
bart_spoon 5y ago
Its not simply "saving". Its where money is so much more valuable tomorrow than it is today, literally no one buys anything because why buy X today when you can buy 2 of X tomorrow? So the economy grinds to a halt. Also, it exacerbates inequality immensely. When deflation is high, it means your existing money becomes more and more valuable for no other reason than existing. So the "rich get richer" in the most literal sense, for no other reason than having been rich in the first place. No investment or risk required.

“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.

by Siira 5y ago

“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.

The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time. Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.

ur-whale 5y ago
That's assuming that BTC's aren't infinitely divisible. Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Therefore, it's unlikely that there will ever be zero bitcoins.
- noch 5y ago
  > Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. True, it'd be a hard fork. However, I don't believe hard forks are impossible if managed properly. The taproot upgrade (not a hard fork, I know) was rather uncontroversial and accepted rather easily. I suspect a hard fork allowing for - say - bitcoin amounts encoded in 64 bits would not necessarily generate the kind of upheaval the blocksize wars did. And, hopefully, even for controversial upgrades, the lessons of said wars will have been learnt and the process of upgrading Bitcoin can be done in a slightly more reasonable / orderly fashion.
- xtracto 5y ago
  This is something not so many people take into account regarding cryptocurrencies. The real "total number" of any cryptocurrency is the total number of decimals they contain. There are currently a total of 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis. A satoshi is $0.00059 USD. A Satoshi could cost $0.01 (1 cent) and it could still be paired with the US economy. If 99% of Satoshis became unavailable, we would still have 21,000,000,000,000 of Satoshis in circulation.
- spiralx 5y ago
  Whether you cut a pie into 10 million slices or 10 billion slices you still only have one pie in total in the same way that changing ten dimes for a hundred cents still means you have a dollar. In a world where only 1,000,000 BTC remain in circulation if one person owns 500,000 of them means he controls half of the total value of BTC and that everyone else's coins will add up to the other 500,000 BTC, and being able to divide the each BTC into smaller and smaller amounts doesn't change that fact. Whether we can divide 500,000 BTC into 50 trillion Satoshis or 5 quadrillion "New Satoshis" worth 1e-10 BTC each doesn't make new wealth appear.

worrycue 5y ago

It’s called a deflationary spiral. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp

bart_spoon 5y ago

Its not simply "saving". Its where money is so much more valuable tomorrow than it is today, literally no one buys anything because why buy X today when you can buy 2 of X tomorrow? So the economy grinds to a halt. Also, it exacerbates inequality immensely. When deflation is high, it means your existing money becomes more and more valuable for no other reason than existing. So the "rich get richer" in the most literal sense, for no other reason than having been rich in the first place. No investment or risk required.