Re:Analyzing Cryptocurrencies Using PostgreSQL
by brokenmachine on Thursday June 29, 2017 @09:36PM
(#14668134)
I'm no financial expert, but I don't understand why it matters that 88% have been produced. Each bitcoin can be split into a lot of pieces. The satoshi is currently the smallest unit of the bitcoin currency recorded on the block chain. It is a one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin.
So if the market cap was 10 trillion rather than 42B, instead of your Big Mac costing 0.00157btc like now, it would cost 0.000006594btc. Why is that a problem?
If bitcoin ever were to become a universal currency, its market cap would need to grow into the tens of trillions. That represents at least a thousandfold increase in participation, and even right now 1% of all wallets hold 99% of the money. The richest wallet right now holds about 315 million USD in bitcoin. Is it truly reasonable that the person that controls that wallet, if bitcoin were to grow a thousandfold to encompass a large part of the global economy, be worth more than the current top four richest people alive? Wealth inequality is bad enough as is.
I think everyone can agree that it would be a disaster for bitcoin to take over traditional currency systems with its current design, where the total money minted ever is already almost all in circulation. By 2020 about 88% of all bitcoin will have been produced. That is just preposterous for anyone considering trying to grow it into a global currency of substance.