I mean, one person buying all the bitcoin would be an excellent way to cause the value to go to zero. If every bitcoin is held by a single person, who else would care?

- pay the salaries of state workers

- pay your tax

It may not look like much, but it's the reason why a regular currency is always worth at least something : some people are legally bound to using it.

There are many fiat currencies that went to zero and no longer exist. Most recently is the Zimbabwe dollar which ceased to exist some years ago and the country had to start using USD and ZAR.

pay the salaries of state workers

When the fiat currency collapses like in Zimbabwe, state workers no longer accept salaries in the currency and demand something else.

And also, when I say one person buy it for a million in actuality the probable “floor value” scenario is a million speculators trying to buy it for a billion dollars.

Bitcoin has been unleashed on the world and it will forever have a life of its own. Unless, of course, enough governments ban it and enough citizens obey the ban. Eventually even this scenario will become impossible.

I think you're right but I'm pretty sure you missed GP's point...

> You really think there isn't a single person on this planet willing to put in 1-10 million to buy up all the bitcoin?

Of course there are people/companies willing to do this: they'd short squeeze the entire supply if they could but... It's not GP's point: GP's point is that there exist a scenario in which the "work" (the "proof of work") required to find one block would be so expensive compared to the value of BTC that it'd be impossible to ever mine a new block on the blockchain. That's be a "death spiral": a PoW forever too high and nobody willing to put in the $$$ in electricity required to mine one block and let alone the huge number of blocks required before the PoW difficulty is lowered. These blocks would be mined at a gigantic loss. The problem is made worse by the PoW only being able by -75% at most: so should some big miner mine at a loss for a very long time, the -75% difficulty "easing" may not be enough.

If anything, of all the dramatic scenario about Bitcoin since it came out, this death spiral has always been the most concerning one.

Compared to the rest of the whitepaper/code this part of Bitcoin always seemed very weak due to poorly choosen parameters (way too many blocks before the difficulty adjusts itself). This poor choice of parameters may be Bitcoin's eventual downfall.

Now... There's a group of devs who basically control the code and you can bet that should the death spiral happen, these devs would magically agree with miners and big players to "vote" on adopting new parameters / relaunching the chain/mining with a much easier difficulty.

That's why I think you're right: it's highly unlikely BTC would go to zero because there'd be an army of people coming to its rescue. But it's quite a range between $18 K (as I type this) and zero.

Again: missing the first for the trees.

I expect that in the "hope dies last" spirit some of the miners will double down, to get higher share of the fees. Whether that's going to be enough to carry through till the network algorithm adapts.. I don't know but wouldn't underestimate the zeal.

Conversely there's an outside chance a really big crash will make it useful.

A sufficiently large crash of Bitcoin will leave most current holders burned. Those that have Bitcoin as a purely speculative play will take some big losses, and get out (maybe permanently).

Ridding Bitcoin of speculators will maybe improve Bitcoin usefulness as currency - but I think main-stream will ignore it and it'll become niche.

At its heart Bitcoin cannot decide if its a fast-appreciating asset, or a currency, and it can't be both. Perhaps a really big correction now can kill the fast-appreciating asset approach for good.

Unfortunately though it seems like as a currency its primary benefit seems to be making risky (aka illegal) face-to-face transactions safer, and hence will likely aquire an ever seedier reputation.

A real solution would be truly decentralized. It needs controlled inflation to avoid incentivizing the capture of the supply and it needs CPU only mining to prevent the eventual emergence of parasitic mafia miners.

Less than zero, because you have to keep putting energy into the network to keep it running.