Topic: What Value do YOU think bitcoins will be worth once all coins are mined? - page 2. (Read 2370 times)

The cost to mine bitcoins is ultimately irrelevant to its market value.  If the value of bitcoins doesn't justify mining for it, people will stop mining.  Suppose it costs me $10,000 to mine an ounce of gold.  Does anyone care?  The current market price is $1500/oz. and that's all I'm going to get for it.  If I don't like it, I shouldn't mine. 

See my signature for my logic of how to calculate what they will be worth.

This implies that either mining bitcoins decreases dramatically in speed when bitcoins cost $95 to make, or pools will need to share transaction fees with the miners (and fees need to be quite high).

Consider the last 10% of the bitcoins, the difficulty will be so high and the return per mhash so low that it could cost several hundred dollars to mine a block that contains just 0.78 reward in bitcoins.

Also, currently the bitcoin nework uses about $2000/hour in power usage for mining?

Well, here's my take, and my reasoning for getting into the bitcoin market.  I was actually going to post something of this sort as a reply in one of the "regulated" forums, but since I've been demoted to a n00b, I suppose the contribution here would be beneficial.

There's only going to ever be 21M bitcoins.  I'll ignore the fact someone could attempt to establish a bitcoin competitor.  So, the question then is, how big does one believe the bitcoin economy can be?  $1B?  $10B?  $100B?  I'll pick $10B for the sake of argument.

Looking at the US or Eurozone GDP / money supply estimates as a baseline, one will find that the currency supply (M0) is roughly 15-20% of the GDP.  This implies for a bitcoin economy of $10B, that the total of all bitcoins would be valued around $2B.  If there are at most 21M bitcoins, that implies a bitcoin could be worth about $95 each.

But... In 2013, there will be only half as many bitcoins.  And, due to their nature, some quantity of bitcoins will be lost for posterity due to inadvertently deleted wallet.dat files, etc.  Other bitcoins may be held back from the market for an extended period of time.  So, if the bitcoin economy takes off and hits $10B "GDP" by 2013, it's possible for a bitcoin to be worth $200 at that time, or possibly more.

It's probably way too much to hope for, but I figured I'd swing for the fences.  The US and Eurozone GDPs are ~$15T each.  If the bitcoin can grow to encompass one of those GDPs, that implies a value of around $150k each.

In any case, I decided to buy in for 1/1,000,000th of the bitcoin economy, whatever that will turn out to be

So if there is only going to be 20 some odd million coins what will they be worth in the end. 100 bucks a coin, 1000, 10,000 a cool mill each? Anyone that knows stocks and how the market works may know the answer to this, I sure would like to know a guesstamate.lol