Topic: 3 stages for bitcoin (Read 1554 times)

I don't think it can 'replace' gold but it's obviously better than gold as a currency. Gold will always have a use as it's a metal and a precious one at that.

I also think that 1 billion users to be too ambitious, 50 million will be remarkable in 3-5 years

if you look at the infographic, you see the barrel with the price tag attached.
To me, that means things are priced in BTC rather than in fiat, which
makes sense as the final stage , happening after the other two.

Actual presentation video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIvqJsCOSo  (bright people)

To send wealth BTC is efficient and fast but to do this you need someone (a trader) who is buying the BTC for the wealth you want to send, in the place you want to have the wealth.
Because of the nature of volatility it is not possible to simply send BTC. You need someone accepting a forward contract paying for BTC what you wish for.

Buying BTC for 100 wealth
making a forward agreement with a trader located close to the place the person lives you want to send the 100 wealth.
Then the trader buys the BTC for 100 wealth from the person you have sent the BTC to.
There might occur a fee.

Nowadays it works this way:
Person A tells his/her bank A to transfer 100EUR in USD to person B which is a customer at bank B.
Bank A tells person A how many USD person B will receive. Costs are: forward contract fee, transaction fee, fee for bank A, fee for Bank B, fee for the clearing company.
Person B receives something like 90EUR in USD.

to make this work, you simply need enough trader or ripple gateways. To get enough trader you have to setup exchanges - this also will lead to an efficient pricing, but only if the exchanges are big enough.
One big Exchange based in a banking network where transactions are free of charge will be enough. Those exchanges have to be connected with each other and need to have a clearing process.
However, to connect the exchanges they have to trust each other and this is only happening if these exchanges are regulated by banking authorities.

A solution would be one big exchange - accepted by every country and its authorities - with an internal clearing process for the real bank accounts. In my opinion it is possible to achieve this, but to do so you need reliable people instead of kids setting up BTC exchanges. People who have deep knowledge about the financial industry, compliance, and banking cyber security. Oh and these people have to be interested in BTC of course

tl;dl: BTC still needs a middleman to be efficient in sending a specific amount of wealth to another person.

As the other poster said, if you watch the video you will see that he says it will not replace any of the fiat currencies, he's talking about replacing the gold standard.

Bitcoin was created as a payment system nothing more nothing less. So, yes it can act as a store of value.
Unit of account? Even the SDR wasn't able to achieve that, but who knows, maybe if the dollar collapses.

Space exploration is the next frontier. In the future, humans will inhabit other planets. This is not speculation, but a guarantee.

When you're on another planet, you'll be communicating with other planets using the internet.

When you want to send 'wealth' to somebody else, the easiest and best option will be BTC. Gold will lose its position as a highly sought after store of value in the future for many reasons, the main one being that it's too cumbersome to handle and move, it also takes an infinitely long time to move it. With BTC, you can send wealth across larger distances much faster than you ever could with gold, or anything else that is physical in nature for that matter.

Open your mind.

The Xapo guy is mad. Bitcoin cannot replace gold. Gold has industrial uses and cultural demand. Costs of mining and refining gold is high. Gold has a high base value. I want to hear his reasons.

I disagree.
It will not replace the gold standard as this does not would make any sense, BUT as soon as other currencies than the USD gets heavily involved into BTC trading, the BTC price will somewhat demonstrate the power of this fiat currency.
If you would think of a world where everyone uses BTC to transfer money (buying a good is nothing else than transferring money). Then in the price BTC/USD BTC/EUR BTC/GBP etc. you would see the buying-power of a single fiat currency in the price for BTC. I think this is what "Xapo guy" meant by this statement.
The BTC exchanges nowadays have way too little traffic that it would show a difference. This would occur in a market with 1 or 2 billion transactions a year like EUREX.

A goal to achieve would be to connect online shops to BTC by showing them the tremendous advantage it offers. Then, in a next step, you need to get customers to use BTC when paying. If you can close this cycle the traffic of the exchanges increases and will show the real worth of BTC. Afterwards you have to add way more services to the BTC exchange cycle to somehow get to the 1bln transactions per year over one single exchange.

Without this BTC is just a nice invention but nothing that gets in the "real world".

Another question you should ask yourself is "Why do banks not allow bank accounts for BitCoin Startups?". If you find a good answer you know what happens if the crypto-currency gets enough awareness by the people. Our old financial system is just cutting way to much money from everyone, producing unnecessary costs and therefore increasing the price a customer has to pay.

True, we have only few million users now, but look at what that has done to the price, now imagine when we get to 20 million, or 200 million..
I believe the goal isnt as far as one may thing because the progress is exponencial.
The main thing now is to keep the people that have embraced bitcoin, and dont let them loose interes in it, allow regulations to be made to lower everyday scams and money laundering etc..

cheers

Isn't it already a unit of account? I think the store of value is the tricky one as it keeps devaluing. Maybe it will balance out somewhere down the line, though.

Though it looks nice and may make some sense, I don't believe that they have a crystal ball to say exactly what's gonna happen.
And then.. it's only nice words and nice pictures.


Also, such predictions may help them in the business.

You know who also said something similar to this? Josh Garza from GaW. And we all know what happened to him and his company now. Personally I think virtual goods NEVER gonna replace anything 'real' Gold is here to stay.

everything looks so easy when they say this or that will happen. but in fact, i doubt if their goals are not a bit too complicated to achieve.

Xapo guy said in the conference that Bitcoin would replace gold as the standard, but that it would not replace national fiat currencies. Pretty wild but it was well reasoned. We'll see.

If we need to reach 1 billion users to reach Stage 2, we're no where close to this 10-15 year roadmap.

We barely have 2 million active users worldwide right now, and will barely crack 5 million by 2019:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102512655

Need to cool it with the 1 billion users, let's keep our 2 million users and grow it from there...

There is no stage 1,2 and 3 on a linear line. The three functions should be 3 parallel bars, happen at the same time. Bitcoin is has a weak store of value because of its volatility. It is already is a payment system.

It is interesting what XAPO's roadmap looks like.

However, I think that the only problem is the public acceptance of BTC, which is because of the fraud/hacking problems.

In my opinion BTC needs a couple of reliable exchanges first. After those have proven to be safe and people trust them it gets easier for merchants to offer BTC as a payment option. Usually merchants do not want to have BTC in their pockets but rather the amount of $/€ they ask for the product.
I think it is a melting process of public awareness and trust and merchants using BTC as a payment option. Due to the fact of the high volatility of BTC I do not think that a merchant will set fix BTC prices for customers but fix €/$ prices according to the spot-market price of BTC to the time a customer purchased a product.

Cheers,
GammaGER

So unit of account is in like 8 to 10 years from now? And what is the difference between store of value and unit of account if both are fluctuating on a daily basis?