Topic: how much could bitcoin actuall gro to per coin? (Read 3315 times)

Spur sales of consoles as mining devices? Reward loyal customers? And at the same time have a system that doesnt suffer from drawbacks of centrally issued digital currencies. Remember, thats the point, if customer dont care about the difference, then bitcoin will compete with all the other digital currencies anyhow. If it turns out consumers do care, corporations could implement whatever aspects of bitcoin that consumers perceive as its strength, even going all the way of opensource and p2p if they have to. What would Sony have to lose? If they would only accept SonyCoins at market prices for their shop, its not like it would cost them anything. They can just sell those coins like anyone else.

It could be made more efficient than Bitcoin by restricting it to a specific hardware however it would never be more efficient than Sony simply using a centralized server to check numbers in a database.  It doesn't reduce the risk of hacking.  If SonyCoin is made by the same designers who built Sony centralized processing backend then it has the risk of having a flaw.  That flaw could still be exploited.  Being distributable doesn't create security.  Worse if limited to specific hardware it is only a matter of time before someone breaks that and runs it on much more powerful hardware instantly gaining 51% control w/ a token amount of hardware.

TL/DR version:
The only singular advantage (and it is massive) that a p2p blockchain has is eliminating the need to trust a 3rd party.  Building a chain which requires trust in a 3rd party is dubious.  You don't gain any advantages over central validation and carry with you all the massive cost, complexity, and additional risks (51% attack, double spends, finney attack, etc) that come w/ a p2p network.  Bitcoins accepts all those costs and risks for the singular goal of not having to trust a 3rd party.  

While Sony may someday create a centrally issued, controlled, and validated SonyBucks I wouldn't consider it a cryptocurrency anymore than eGold, Dwolla, or Beenz are crypto-currencies.  Digital money?  Sure but not a crypto-currency as defined by Satoshi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com

The question is if consumers will make that distinction; if enough consumer dont, then you have competition even if the competing systems arent p2p.

If they do, it still wouldnt preclude any corporation (or government for that matter) from launching one. Just about every second poster on this forum seems to have started an alt chain at some point. They might tinker with it, like giving themselves the option to generate coins with no mining, premine a shitload of coins, make it so that the mining only works on their devices (think gaming console) or who knows what. Frankly, I have no idea what they could come up with, but Im not going to assume there is not going to be fierce competition for bitcoin.

 

Why not? After all the hacking incidents, Sony might get the idea that p2p is more secure than centralized. Im sure they could come up with a mining algorithm that can only work with their hardware. I mean, thats just one thought: you can obtain SonyCoins by just running your console or sony laptop. Each playstation game or sony movie you buy gives you some key that allows a higher hashrate or mine on other chains within the SonyCoin system that would have a lower difficulty. Dont ask me how, I got no clue, and if I had, Sony would have to pay me for the idea :p


SonyCoin could be made orders of magnitude more efficient by limiting the devices that can mine by relying on some builtin TPM module needed to sign hashes or something.

collars, it would be immensely useful.  Then people could have a knowable band is which BTCs will fluctuate.

Optimistic - yes wildly so I think.
My own 'optimistic' scenario I wrote above suggested that over $90Billion per year in transactions *could* be supported on only a fraction of the coins, and with only a value of $30 per coin.
Now there were probably a lot of wild assumptions in my scenario - but I don't think you can just take some transaction demand in $billions and divide by the number of coins to get a per coin trading value.

There are so many wonderful uses for gold that will improve the quality of life for mankind. I hope one day we are not still hoarding it like Magpies.

I could easily envision that the worldwide transaction demand for BTC could easily reach $2 billion or more.  Given that there are less than 8 million bitcoins out there, that would equate to $250 per coin.  Bitcoins is the perfect instrument for small ticket item transaction ecommerce and people will have to hold a bitcoin inventory to transact, so I'm very optimistic.

Personally, I feel Bitcoin will become the de facto trading currency, whilst gold becomes the dominant "saving" currency. But I could be wrong.

I see. Though if Bitcoin is truly superior, I'd expect protection of the dollar to be unsustainable in the long run.


This is far from proven (and I'm no economist), but I am under the impression that what you say here is the real reason we can generally use only one currency in any given country. In other words, governments enforce currency monoculture.

Admittedly there are few precedents for parallel general purpose currencies. Though there is the outstanding example of the WIR in Switzerland.

Bitcoin is superior (IMHO) to fiat currencies for a variety of reasons.  If Bitcoin isn't superior to USD it will fail (at least for users who lives are denominated in USD).

Fiat currencies have the backing of the law ensuring they are not required to battle for survival in a free market.  No matter how crappy the US Dollar is it is the only currency which is legal tender in the US and that obligates its continued existence no matter how inferior.

Bitcoin has no such "crutch" or protection meaning IT must be superior or it will be displaced.

Does that mean Bitcoin could never co-exist with conventional currencies? That one must kill the other?

Sometimes called the ebay effect.

Is ebay perfect?  Of course not yet but it retains the lions share of online auction traffic simply because it moved first and was "good enough" to kill upstarts.   IMHO is Bitcoin is "good enough" it will survive challenges.  If something else is overwhelmingly superior it wouldn't co-exist w/ Bitcoin ... it will KILL Bitcoin.

The only area that you have seen any traction against Ebay has been niche markets
* penny (gambling) aucitons (swoopo)
* fixed price stores (i.e. fullfilled by Amazon)
* no cost / no control listings (i.e. Craigslist)

they were niche enough to not direclty compete w/ Ebay and gained traction.

It is likely that a similar dynamic will evolve in crypto-currency.  Coins which try to directly compete w/ Bitcoin (or be silver to Bitcoins "gold") like SolidCoin, or LiteCoin will be marginalized and never gain an effective economy.  Coins which do something different like Namecoin or a micropayment currency will be able to carve out a niche to flourish.

I agree with DAT. There's no reason why centralized company or government should run it's own blockchain. P2P currency is good only for P2P audience.

I can imagine that two projects of p2p cryptocurrency can live together only if their features will be completely different. However I don't see any point in those aternative scamcoins or coins which are different only in technical details (like only cpu mining).

Also Bitcoin has huge advantage because it is first p2p currency. Every new project, even with significantly better features, will fight with "why xxxcoin when we already have bitcoin".

I think maybe we need to define crypto-currency.  I was speak of system devised by Satoshi a peer to peer distributed currency that requires no trusted 3rd party for validation.

No company like Sony is going to ever use a Sony p2p currency only for use in Sony land.  There is no advantage of using a p2p currency in a centralized system.  It is massively inefficient to do so (there is significant overhead in blockchain that can be easily handled by a trusted 3rd party = Sony).  Simply put Bitcoin is HORRIBLE inefficient it just happens to be the only way to handle commerce without a central trusted 3rd party.  If you have a central trusted 3rd party you don't need Bitcoin or any p2p currency.

e-currency backed by precious metals can't be decentralized.  Some one needs to issue it (the mint) and hold the physical metal.  Building a p2p network on top of a completely centralized entity (i.e. if that party defrauds everyone they can walk away w/ gold) makes no sense.  If you trust the entity to not run away with the gold you already have a central trusted 3rd party.  They can validate transactions without the massive cost and complexity of a block chain.

No government is going to embrace crypto-currencies for the exact reason they left the Gold standard.  It is likely no currency will ever re-adopt a gold standard much less handing all control over to "the people" in the form of p2p networks.

If you broadly consider any mechanism of online payment (to include e-gold & Paypal) no matter how centralized and closed as a "crypto-currency" then yes there will be hundreds maybe thousands.

Also I would like to clarify that I never said it is impossible for a second currency to co-exist just that it would need to be different enough to provide utility in an area that Bitcoin fails to deliver.

I can think of a thousand reasons. At least . Seriously, different currencies could have different properties that appeal to other users. different technical features and economic rules. Some might be backed by precious metals, others could be issued by google/facebook/microsoft/sony and be the only crypto currency accepted on their app stores/wallet services, yet others could be marketed at specific niches or with some, I dont know, maybe an embedded loyalty scheme or whatever. And lets not forget at some point government sanctioned crypto currencies.

I think its a bit naive to assume bitcoin will be the one crypto currency to rule them all. In the short/medium term that seems reasonable, but once the concept gains acceptance, I expect fierce competition and some of alternatives may prove to be superior and/or become more popular.

Ok, but it still leaves the possibility. Like I said, we tend to assume a currency monoculture under all conceivable circumstances, but this may not always continue to be the economic reality.

Of course that assumes some consumer feels the need to acquire (via one method or another) the inferior coin to begin with and that those sales would actually be lost (many consumers aren't ideologically tied to their currency and thus would be willing to pay in a variety of methods).

2000 years ago a merchant "could" potentially have lost some sales by accepting gold and not accepting granite as currency however I doubt many were concerned about the potential lost sales.

Cool, I understand your points.

One reason is that you'd lose out on business from customers who use the inferior coin.

I think you are still missing the point.  The quesiton is CAN YOU but WHY?  Why would you accept an inferior crypto-currency over a superior one?  You like less liquid exchanges, you less greater risk of double spend, you like less places to spend your earned funds?

Also I am not saying Bitcoin is "the coin" the point is that if something is better than Bitcoin it likely won't co-exist it will REPLACE Bitcoin.  That is certainly possible (and it is also possible that no crypto-currency flourishes).  If the "something" is inferior to Bitcoin it likely will never gain any meaningful acceptance.

Can someone fix the typos in the op? They irk me :/