As best I can tell 35.5% of all bitcoins have already been minted. These 7,473,950 coins are all property of existing bitcoin users. There seem to be about 41,280 registered members of this site. I'll be generous and say there are ten times as many bitcoin users as there are members. That means about 410,280 bitcoin owners with on average 18 BTC each. Clearly BTC ownership is more concentrated than this, but lets be egalitarian for the moment.
If we pretended all bitcoin owners were all Americans that is about 0.13% of the population. It's not of course. Bitcoin is intended to be a world currency. So 0.0068% of the world population own 100% of all current and at least 35.5% of all possible bitcoins.
The view on this forum is that the world will come to their senses, throw out fiat currencies and move to something rational like Bitcoin. This of course means 6,000,000,000 people basically begging to use a resource owned by a relative handful of people. Say we just minted up the remaining 13,526,050 BTC and scattered them to late adopters purely out of the kindness in our hearts. That means about 0.00225 BTC for each of them to use in rebuilding their economy. Sure 18 BTC on average doesn't make us feel very rich. But it is 8,000 times what everyone else would have if we stopped competitive minting today.
But we won't stop competing of course. Sometime around Pearl Harbor Day of next year Bitcoin will hit the 50% distributed mark.
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By that day, how many active Bitcoin users and daily goods trades do there need to be to make a sustainable Bitcoin economy viable?
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Because to potential new adopters, after that point Bitcoin is going to look like a new a 21,000,000 coin currency with a 10,500,000 coin pre-generation that went to the creator and his "friends". Certainly people will stop caring about Bitcoin long before they show up on our doorsteps with signs saying,
"We are the 99.9932%!"
