[ExI] How can people be so blind about Bitcoin and the future?

[Christian Hägg]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 8:22 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Even on an exponential curve, assuming Bitcoin grows to somewhat bigger
> than the conventional markets (unlikely, given the finite total possible
> number of bitcoins, unless sub-bitcoin currencies take off in similar
> speed), we're probably talking multiple decades given how far behind it is.
>

It might be worth noting that minimum unit that the Bitcoin can be divided
into, the satoshi (10^-8 Bitcoins), isn't a fundamental limit of
divisibility, as much as it's the currently agreed-upon one. If the satoshi
were ever to become too valuable (say, >1 cent/satoshi, leading to a >1
million USD value per Bitcoin), the Bitcoin community would probably divide
it.

As a fun side note, the current amount of Bitcoins that have been mined
(~12 million) can be divided into 1.2*10^15 satoshis. This is on the same
order of magnitude as last year's world GDP in terms of purchasing power,
taken in U.S. cents (~8.5*10^15 cent).

Max interpreted Brent's position in another thread as "everyone should have
at least one Bitcoin". I'm mostly optimistic about its future as well.
However, we're already past the point where a significant number of humans
think things like "I can't afford a whole Bitcoin, so I'll go buy some
Litecoins instead."

Litecoin, and some other altcoins, rely on scrypt, a cryptographic key
derivation algorithm that imposes high memory requirements on miners. The
Litecoin designer's intention for using scrypt was, in part, to make CPU
mining more cost-effective than GPU or ASIC mining, and thus to make
Litecoin mining far less esoteric than Bitcoin mining. Even grandma can
mine Litecoin on her archaic computer! Unfortunately for the designer, it
didn't work. GPU mining of Litecoins is currently the best strategy, with
ASICs under development.

I think there's a dangerous idea from the point of view of Bitcoin
adherents in there. If some "scrypt-like" key derivation algorithm is
developed which actually restricts mining to CPUs to a significant extent,
the network effect could tip the cryptocurrency user base away from
Bitcoin. (Again, a lot of people are unhappy about missing the "whole
Bitcoin" boat, and would rather start with something new, than to yield to
some soulless, behemoth gov... err, ASIC farm and group of early
investors.) Of course, that's a very big if.


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