Topic: WHY 21 MILLION BITCOIN CANNOT SERVE THE WHOLE WORLD - page 2. (Read 887 times)

The question is being raised again and again, because Bitcoin is having a disadvantage with both its name and its sub-units. First let's take the name. The "coin" part gives an impression that it can't be further subdivided, when in reality nothing can be farther from the truth. Especially the newer users are getting confused by this name.

Now coming to the units, one Bitcoin is being subdivided in to 100 million Satoshis. There is nothing in between. mBTC is an informal unit, and it doesn't have a name of its own. A few names were suggested for mBTC, but there was no consensus. And we need smaller units badly now, as the exchange rates have surged past the $10,000 per coin level. Even mBTC may be too big for practical purposes now.

I think off chain we wont be using Bitcoin, we wont ever have purely one type of currency.    This system now is the peak of one currency type dominating the world, the only other system that has been as dominant as Dollar is gold and that was only indirectly by reference or exchange of each local currency unit being either fixed or varied rates in ratio to gold.
    People see this trend of one currency dominance since ww2 not peaking but increasing and continuing even while we transition to Bitcoin.  I'm going to say I'm quite certain nobody is going to dominate quite as much as Dollar did ever again, computers allow us to vary the world and with lower costs and better efficiency.  Diversification is the most likely turning point here not more of the same of the last 60 years.


So its alot, its a simple point but a good one even if you come to the wrong conclusion.   Again for the same point I said above, Bitcoin doesnt need to describe every value in every country of the world.   BTC is transactional, it only really needs to serve its purpose as conveying value online securely and for that moment in time and its done a stellar job of maintaining that standard even if the value has varied considerably.

We dont need Bitcoin to replace the store of value in a banks vaults not even virtually do we need it to do that job.   There is always going to be dozens of asset types with various characteristics.   It wont always be decentralised just like we are still using websites now, there will be places that contain and describe value locally.



I'll post this up because its ancient and its been a fair reflection of varied asset value for a while, I think its going to keep being true in future.     The price might be $ on this chart but the asset itself is the value really, there is no notes attached.  The $ in this case just helps to clarify value for comparison, in great many cases it never goes near to being a cash transaction.
     I think we have a common misunderstanding of accounting perhaps, not really a Bitcoin problem as gold is also accused of not being sufficient to describe cash transactions.  The value of gold will rise surely in greater usage and also people will never be hauling round gold bars, Bitcoin being easier to transact doesnt I think make it any more likely in that way.

We are going to have to agree to disagree again. It's difficult to measure "adoption", but we can look at surrogate markers like number of unique addresses, number of transactions per day, hashrate, and so forth, all of which are on a relatively steady upward trend. There are sites which attempt to create lists of merchants which accept crypto, such as coinmap.org. Obviously, they will miss huge numbers of merchants, but even then, the number on that site is growing by around 50 a week.

At the moment, maybe it's just a bonus. But governments around the world are moving ever more strongly towards blanket surveillance and monitoring of the population. They already freeze accounts and seize the money of people who speak out against them or cause them too many headaches. Perhaps you might find that being in control of your own money becomes more attractive in the future.

Adoption of lightning network and how it works are totally different stuff.

The adoption might be low but at the same time it works the way it was suppose to work and I fully support the work put into it. Right now, we are talking about a system where you can send bitcoin for cents and considering its a billion dollar transaction community that is a big upgrade to what we have right now which is a lot of money sent.

You can still order your cup of coffee with couple cents on transaction fee but we can't never know how long it will take, maybe it will be 10 minutes, maybe it will be 6 hours, it all depends on how clogged the blockchain is at that moment. Hence lightning network is really a must in the future, it may take time but there are places that doesn't use segwit yet, so it will take a long time.

Okay, let's call it square two

Yeah, I know it is still better than none (or just one), but we still have 62 more to pass. The point is, one swallow doesn't make a summer (two swallows don't make it either, just in case). It is mass adoption that counts (the grand scheme of things, in your terms), and I don't see us moving in that direction, slowly or otherwise. Personally, I can go as far as to say that Bitcoin has failed as a means of payment, even though it doesn't mean that it failed in general as you can't seriously consider something worth 10k per unit a failure. In essence, that means Bitcoin is not to be spent, it is to be hoarded or used as a hedge (dealer's choice). This is the direction we are moving in


See? I can definitely feel your pain


I'm totally cool with that but for most of us it is just a welcome bonus of sorts. In other words, it is not something extremely important that our entire life depends on or turns around. Being able to cash out is, though

Not having a complete bitcoin ecosystem for everyone in the country from salary through to buying groceries is not the same as being back at square one and having no adoption. Adoption is gradual and takes time. I've gone from never spending bitcoin to spending it at 1, and then 2, and then 3, and then more merchants. I can earn bitcoin without touching fiat, pay in bitcoin without touching fiat, and I know at least 2 of the merchants I use pay some of their staff (at least partly) in bitcoin. That seems pretty self-sufficient to me, and certainly isn't "square one" in terms of adoption.

Unfortunately I agree that the majority of people don't actually want to put in any effort. I've lost count of the number of times on this forum people have asked "where can I spend bitcoin", but have never actually approached a single merchant or vendor and asked to pay them in bitcoin. Create a demand for it, and merchants will start accepting it!

I love spending bitcoin. I love knowing that there isn't some faceless bank tracking everything I buy, and using it to build a profile of me (and probably handing that information over to the government). I love knowing that I'm never going to have a payment declined because my bank don't like what I'm buying, or have for some reason decided I'm not allowed to spend my own money how I want. I'll spend bitcoin wherever possible.

This is not the first time this question is raised

If you look through topics created 4-5 years ago, you will find quite a few suggesting to divide Bitcoin further (as if it could help its price), as well as discussing different names for different subunits of a whole bitcoin. Does it make any sense? I guess not much as the lowest sensible denomination would still be defined and determined by the amount of fees required to confirm a Bitcoin payment within a reasonable timeframe. And that, as of now, is about a few thousand satoshi, which turns the whole idea into an exercise in stupidity and futility

Guys why some of you are eager to change how we call bitcoin? Is really a big deal and an important thing to discussed with? Actually, for me, "bitcoin (btc)" was already okay enough. For me it doesn't really matter since converting of units are not so hard to do so .

I'd go for mBTC. Satoshi is having very low value now and I don't want it to become the unit in which the prices are denominated. But we need to create a name for mBTC, just like we have Satoshi. And we need to create a unique, short name. There have been proposals to rename mBTC as BitCent and BitPenny, but I don't like those names. Let's have something unique.

It is a difference that makes the difference, right?

The point being that even if you didn't mean it that way, it still resonated like adoption is anything including what actually constitutes a fiat payment. More specifically, you may think like you are paying with crypto while your coins simply get converted to fiat in the process. And how is it different from you converting crypto to fiat yourself and then spending the proceeds? I don't know about you, but to me, conceptually, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other


Yes, I understand your pains

But you can't really expect people to go out and demand cryptocurrency payments. People want adoption, I mean real adoption, but they don't want to do anything to that effect themselves, i.e. to actually promote such adoption. If things were different, we would have already been there by now. But since we are not, that instantly sends us back to square one (read, no adoption of crypto as a full-fledged and self-sufficient means of payment)


I'm not a holder, and far from being one

I'm more of a trader type (if that makes any difference in your internal hierarchy of the cryptocurrency folk), so crypto for me is like capital. Well, it is indeed working capital for me and spending it is a big fat no. If I didn't have a fiat option, I would be forced to spend coins, of course (as I sometimes still do in the way described above), but other than that, it is the last thing that I would willingly do

From the discussion above, I think the world shouldn't be in chaos for bitcoin to spend. One reason for now is that there is no general adoption yet.
Two, even if bitcoin or cryptocurrency is replacing fiat, bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency existing. Meaning other crypto will be adopted and made relevant to support, follow the crypto usage and circulation.
Three, then we know that bitcoin has many other smaller units , 100,000,000 satoshi gives us just one bitcoin

I wasn't using that as an argument to say adoption is widespread; I was using that as argument that people spend their bitcoins. And I spend bitcoin directly with merchants who accept them several times a week. Incidentally, one of these merchants is a local small business who I spoke to about using bitcoin several times, and now they do. If you want to see adoption, then go out and create demand for it.

Totally incorrect. If given the choice, I would pay with bitcoin 10 times out of 10.

I think the issue here is that you are assuming that everyone is a holder like you, who is only interested in accumulating more. There are also plenty of people like me who are keen to spend their coins and support bitcoin's growth whenever possible.

Let me guess

People who receive their salary in bitcoins, first have to convert the coins to dollars (or whatever) before they can actually spend them. In this way I also spend some coins every week, then buy back when the price turns sufficiently around (a lifehack, you can live off that difference if your volume is high enough). The same story goes with Bitcoin credit card cards and payment processors - merchants are still accepting fiat only, end of story. If that relates to you as adoption, I think you have to reconsider your perspective

Further, you can assess almost anything either by its presence as well as absence or by the presence as well as absence of something else. As we see that Bitcoin's volatility doesn't subside (in fact, it has been at pretty high if not to say record levels recently), there is no plausible reason to believe or expect that the real adoption is indeed rising. And while I totally agree with you that the only way to stabilize prices is to make speculation irrelevant (the thing I've been telling here for years), the reality can't be ignored unless you deliberately choose so

And the next bottom line in this series of posts is that whenever given a choice, people will hoard their coins and spend fiat instead (as per famous Gresham's Law). Obviously, if you don't have that choice, Bitcoin becomes your only option and recourse. But that's not the case with most people apart from completely unbanked ones and deprived of a fiat income source at that. Hence no way people are going to spend Bitcoin en masse

To avoid the threat of inflationary depreciation, the creators of Bitcoin initially laid down the principle of a limited number of virtual coins. Their total number will never exceed 21 million. So, people start thinking that it will be not enough for the whole of mankind. It is not true.
First, the price and value of Bitcoin will be growing all the time, and secondly, each BTC can be split to Satoshi.

But people do spend their coins. I spend bitcoin several times a week. There are people who receive their salary I'm bitcoin, and so have no choice but to spend large amounts of their coins. The number of merchants accepting bitcoin is growing. Why would bitcoin credit card cards and payment processors even exist if there was zero demand for them? Just because you don't want to spend your coins (which is fine - totally your choice), doesn't mean everyone else shares that view.

Adoption is what drives growth. Without adoption, there is only baseless speculation. Speculating gives surges to $20k, sure, but it also gives huge drops to $3k. Adoption gives sustainable proce growth. Once adoption grows enough, the price will stabilise, and holders like yourself will be more likely to start using bitcoin as it was intended - as a currency.

That is why right now the Bitcoin community should start adopting mBTC or milli-bitcoin. 1 mBTC is $10.10 today. One satoshi is still less than one US cent so I think everyone can still own bitcoins, just in the lower decimals.

Well, this is not what I meant

The problem is not with Lightning itself but rather with "the grand scheme of things" as you put it. In other words, even if it is brutally efficient on its own (fees and all), it can't further something when there is nothing to further. You see, there are only 21M bitcoins and given that, why would folks want to spend their precious coins? No way if you ask me

In this manner, OP is technically right, though not for the reasons stated. Bitcoin is inherently deflationary (despite its total supply still increasing), and no Lightning Network is going to change that. Long story short, people don't spend gold, digital or otherwise. That's why it can't serve the world as it is more like the world is to serve Bitcoin

It isn't widely used yet. That doesn't mean it is somehow broken or dysfunctional. Lightning is pretty much still brand new in the grand scheme of things, and adoption takes time.

It does. Lightning is still in beta, but can still be used now, and is instant and near feeless. It is working well. Adoption will come.

Why do I have a feeling that some bias is at work here?

So you basically assume that since we don't know the real number of Lightning Network nodes, this number must be huge. To me, this is a loose assumption. Further, even if you agree that capacity is not the same as volume (the point which I agree with too), it does in fact say nothing about the number of transactions or the amount of bitcoins being moved using this capacity. The meaning being that there can as easily be none (or next to none). Assuming otherwise, and otherwise being a multiple of that capacity, seems even more far fetched to me

The bottom line is that we don't know the real situation other than what we see at 1ml.com. But what we know for certain is that Lightning Network is not widely used where it is expected to be used, i.e. in places like cafés, pubs, bars, maybe even brothels, and similar institutions. This is what counts in the end as Lightning Network is supposed to fix the innate problems which prevent Bitcoin from being used as a means of payment (read, private nodes are completely inconsequential). But if it is still not used for that, how can Lightning Network actually help here?

Not at all.

Yes, the capacity has dropped recently. No, that isn't a cause for concern. Over the first part of the year, lnbig.com funded and opened channels to every public node, causing the big increase in capacity. They recently started closing down channels to inactive nodes, which has caused the recent decrease. It's also possible people removed funds from channels to trade as bitcoin's price climbed from $4k to $12k.

Why is this not concerning? Two reasons. Firstly, the only numbers we are tracking here are public nodes. These public nodes are generally used to route your payment through to reach its final destination. We don't know how many private nodes there are, which include the most commonly used Lightning wallets such as Eclair. It is likely there are far more private nodes than there are public ones. Secondly, capacity is not the same as volume. Capacity is needed to route a transaction, but says nothing about the number of transactions or volume of BTC being moved through LN.