What happens when people die and nobody can un-encrypt their wallets? Sad day for whoever's next of kin. That's not a problem with bitcoin, that is the problem of one idiot user not taking his own mortality into account when handling his money. A nationwide wildfire could theoretically destroy an entire nation's fiat, you know how common nation-wide EMP blasts are? As common as nation-wide fires. And last time I checked
EMPs DO NO DAMAGE TO PAPER WALLETS. How dare you call yourself a miner when displaying such blatant ignorance!? Back up your shit, and it's good against the destruction of the backed-up material. If you have bitcoin and two neurons to rub together, you have several backups in several forms and storage means.
Yeah, at the time, 32K seems excessive. I think we'll be at 10K by 2020, tops.
Sure, any other and more widely accepted crypto has a chance at being as (or more) popular and widely used than bitcoin. And we can sit here and type for days about the millions of hypothetical scenarios where bitcoin ends below the competition (be it fiat or altcoins). One bitcoin is 1
billion satoshi. There will be 21 million billion satoshi by the time all bitcoin are mined. Even if 90% of that is lost, we will have 2.1 million billion satoshi... are those not enough to circulate? There are $5 trillion in printed cash
in the world. There is (the equivalent) of 500 trillion pennies in cash in the world at the moment (according to this:
http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth).
Are 2,000 trillion satoshi (10% of total bitcoin that there will ever be) not enough to be used as cash!? "Eventually, it will not be enough!" what a dishonest argument. We won't have to worry about that. Our children won't have to worry about that. Our children's children might ponder that someday there might not be enough satoshi to use bitcoin as fiat... I doubt that the hypothetical scenario of having to re-start block rewards will happen this century.
No form of value exchange is intrinsically backed by anything. Gold? Just pretty looking metal, arbitrarily chosen to be valuable. Fiat? Backed by politic stability, look at what happened to the Euro over the Greek drama. Crypto? Arbitrarily chose bits and bytes to represent value. So long as it's good to exchange for goods and services,
I dont care what arbitrary, human-created token we use.Just forget such stupid "we will not have enough satoshi" or "lost bitcoin is not recoverable" arguments. 2 years ago I have shown how we could indefinitely sub-divide a satoshi with a soft-fork.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=256516.10no we should not forget anything... this is the same as printing more dollars.... your idea is a fiat scheme... which means bitcoin is not being straight forward.. instead of 'forgetting' about it, i think it's time to take this argument to the next level.......... .... 'we will have enough satoshi' that is a good one hhahhahhahha .
Do you even think? You're not making sense here. Increasing divisibility is not the same as printing more dollars, it's the same as breaking up dollars into pennies, or pennies into even smaller units if the dollar becomes so valuable that even pennies have to be broken up into smaller parts. Use your brain man.
i see what your saying.. and it still sounds like a fiat scheme to me... your still creating a new unit of currency to trade... you may as well make more bitcoins.
Absolutely not. Increasing the number of full bitcoins past 21M is inflationary, necessarily stealing (real) wealth from all current holders through the hidden tax known as inflation. Further subdividing beyond satoshis allows all current holders to retain wealth.
Of course, there will be somewhere on the order of 2.1 quadrillion satoshis* before accounting for permanent losses. I forget the figures, but there was a comparison done several years ago between 2.1Q satoshis, and the number of US pennies required to denominate world wealth. They were plausibly within the same order of magnitude.
*(Unless something has changed there are 100 million satoshis in a Bitcoin, not 1 billion as stated earlier).
Oh yeah - that EMP scenario? Do you really feel this is a problem only with bitcoin? You do realize that most fiat money is electronic as well, right? I have more faith in my backup scheme's resistance to EMP, than I do the backups my banks maintain.
