Committed ideological Bitcoin supporters commonly believe in a network effect race condition spiral they call 'hyperbitcoinization' which models a world where a sort of event horizon in market adoption had been crossed, and everyone on Earth is forced to use bitcoin either directly or indirectly.

In this techno-feudalist scenario, being one of the Bitcoin 1% or even 10% means the world is at your feet, and if you've maintained good opsec, nobody may even know how much of their lives are your property.

Reminds me of this satire post from reddit (4yrs old). https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...

It correctly predicted BTC at $10k in 2017. So much for satire!

It also incorrectly predicted it from 2013-2017.

>and if you've maintained good opsec

Don't exchanges verify identity? Wouldn't you be committing fraud by maintaining good opsec?

Point being is that someone may eventually leak an exchange database with those details. Then the word's out. Kind of like Equifax.

If you subscribe to the Bitcoin in-universe dogma that views committing fraud and extortion as something that central banks and governments do, not what free market actors entering into voluntary contractual agreements with one another (which are regulated by math and logic spelled out in open source code) do, then maintaining good opsec is not just good business but a moral imperative.

Lets say you never maintain much in the exchange, and always tumble coins before moving them in/out.

It would certainly be possible to prove identity when transferring BTC in/out of an exchange, but make it exceedingly hard to prove that they ultimately make it to/from wallets you control.

But of course possible does not mean it is likely.

This is what I don't understand. In the hypothetical case where we switch to using bitcoin won't early adopters be the only people with money? What about the 99.9(9?)% of the population who don't own any bitcoins?

How are you thinking the switch would occur? It's not like the "old" currencies will suddenly lose their value, you'll be able to exchange them for a long time.

Plus, most people don't own that much currency anyway; they either get a paycheck (which can start coming in BTC) or an asset like a house, which is valuable in any currency.

When I said "only people with money" I meant "meaningful amount of money" but I can see what you're saying. I'm not sure what I'm struggling with about the concept...time for me to do some more reading / thinking.

USD has already declined in value 3x over the past 6 weeks, compared to BTC

Everything has declined in value over the past 6 weeks compared to BTC.

The value of the dollar has declined a few hundred percent vs the price of nvidia stock in the past year, too. I'm not really sure that sort of comparison makes sense.

Welcome to serfdom.

Wouldn't the same scenario play out with any other cryptocurrency? Early adopters will sit on the bulk of it.