Stranded sats \ stacker news ~bitcoin

12.6k sats \ 72 comments \ @elvismercury 22 Nov 2023 bitcoin

The other day @TNStacker posted a story about preventing your UTXOs from becoming dust. This taps into one of my sources of paranoia about the accessible sats trending toward zero over time. The logic is something like:

btc becomes vastly more popular
block subsidy shrinks
fee rates rise
normal-size stacks turn to dust

The 'solution' to this is to migrate transactions less than some giant sum to L2 of some type, either literal L2; or some quasi-L2 custodianship, federation, etc. But I obsess with the idea of all this fragmentation, where so many of the stacks become inaccessible; and that's saying nothing about the coins that keep getting lost over time. It's like the heat death of the universe, but in software.

I don't really have a point other than this is a thing I think about. Presumably someone has explored the idea before. Links or thoughts would be welcome.

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406 sats \ 7 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023

I am not so worried about the future use of sats.

Slowly in time, sats will be more valuable. And I mean not in fiat price, but in purchasing power.

That means, in time, with less sats you could buy more things. Free market on steroids, each product / service will have its value priced in sats based on demand and supply.

Nowadays, on LN we have a shit ton of sats (like 5000+ BTC on the public nodes, not including also the private nodes that are NOT displayed in that public chart). This is a giant amount of sats, if you think about. I think we can double this amount on LN and we still have plenty of sats to trade product and services, fast, cheap, private.

Onchain UTXOs must be used EXCLUSIVELY for opening / closing LN channels. That means, we should not worry too much that we will not have enough UTXOs or whatever doom scenario.

Yes, we need some improvements for LN and are on their way... slowly we will get to that. LN is still a small child of 4 years, not even is walking well. Still have lot of time to grow and get an adult, like Bitcoin onchain.

Start using LN every day, test all kind of wallets, solutions, payments and give feedback to developers. They need that in order to improve the code.

110 sats \ 1 reply \ @TNStacker 22 Nov 2023

I think @DarthCoin is right on here. As I am learning about and deploying utxo management and coinjoins/mixing I am cleaning up the old, while modifying practices going forward.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023 freebie

https://i.postimg.cc/W1RhLbvg/darth-truth.gif

269 sats \ 4 replies \ @brandonsbytes 22 Nov 2023

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103 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023

Prepare from now your LN bank... We are pioneers, we have to learn to build solutions for the heard that is coming. Don't waste your time trading shitcoins. learn more about BTC/LN and build solutions for people around you, close to you.

https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/bitcoin-private-banks-over-lightning

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @TSW 22 Nov 2023

Yes. In the future, 99% of the world population will be priced out of using L1. Only the ones that are early and stacked a large enough stack will be using on-chain. For myself, I only have UTXOs of 1M sats or larger for this reason. These might need to be consolidated at some point as well.

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

Yup, that could happen. That's why it's worrisome. @DarthCoin's suggestion is certainly part of the solution -- figuring out how to migrate stuff onto LN ASAP in a sensible way.

I expect other types of solution will arise, such as the emergence of new institutions that make different tradeoffs w/ sovereignty. You can already see it, in some ways that people don't like (e.g., exchanges) and some people generally like (e.g., fedimint) and everything in between (collaborative custody at Unchained, Casa, etc.)

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023

poor folks, can't afford to take their sats off LN for cold storage

btw, we were screaming out loud all these years: buy and use bitcoin, meanwhile they were ignoring us or even worse, using shitcoins... now they get what they fucking deserve.

618 sats \ 21 replies \ @SpaceHodler 22 Nov 2023

I can envision the following scenario:

People lose sats through stranding. Effectively the supply, over time, shrinks to, say, a fraction of 1 BTC.
One day a stack is rediscovered, e.g. an archaeologist digs up a steel plate.
The market is flooded with sats, the supply increases and people's sats lose value overnight.

They're not happy. The start a hard fork to remove that from circulation. Which is technically a new money, but one that preserves the relative wealth among them.

303 sats \ 17 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

That's a beautiful illustration of how money is really a social consensus, whatever its technical characteristics. The unearthed btc in your example would be technically legitimate but not socially legitimate. Everyone in the world, aside from the archeologists, would have an extremely strong desire to keep the distribution of wealth as it was; and for good reason: it would be a Cantillon effect like no other in history.

I think this is a really helpful lens to think about how the existing system feels / will feel about btc. And if you know that those social processes are at work, what's the best thing that could happen? What's the worst thing that could happen? If you're a btc advocate, what could you do to promote one and resist the other?

This reminds me a bit of the economics thought experiment you proposed a few weeks ago, @Undisciplined.

269 sats \ 16 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Nov 2023

That is a very interesting scenario. I don't understand everything that goes into the stranded sats issue well enough to have a strong opinion about SpaceHodler's first point, but the second and third points are going to happen every so often.

There are a couple of non-Bitcoin analogues that come to mind.

As certain materials become more expensive, we'll see people start mining landfills and that will occasionally have big price effects when they strike a motherload.
The closer analogue is asteroid mining. Someone is going to wrangle an asteroid with more gold than will ever be discovered on Earth and the impact will be enormous.

I've thought about the asteroid scenario a bunch. Of course, it doesn't have a hard fork option. Gold will just lose most of its monetary value, but will become a widely used material. The similarity is in the way people's fortunes will be wrecked and how they'll attempt to protect them.

I wonder if the hard fork would happen swiftly enough to protect existing wealth or if the discoverer would anticipate that reaction and be able to head it off, somehow.

272 sats \ 15 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

I wonder if the hard fork would happen swiftly enough to protect existing wealth or if the discoverer would anticipate that reaction and be able to head it off, somehow.

It's fun to think about what it would mean exactly from a technical pov -- since the supply is limited, drawing from this ancient UTXO would be immediately apparent. But you can imagine scenarios where btc adoption had progressed to something like what Monero or Grin has, where everyone is using some privacy tech s.t. transactions are shielded to such an extent that it's not immediately evident what the source is.

I guess the devil's in the details.

290 sats \ 14 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Nov 2023

We have to remember that not everyone would be against this infusion. Whoever they're going to be spent with will be for it. Could this archeologist arrange enough side payments to thwart the hard-forkers? It is really interesting to think about.

My guess is that there will be more gradual processes that prevent us from being in that situation.

424 sats \ 5 replies \ @SpaceHodler 22 Nov 2023

Bitcoin could be updated preemptively to expire UTXOs that are e.g. more than 100 years old. If you have generational wealth in UTXOs nearing that age, you'd have to move them before they expire.

256 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

I expect in time the appetite for these sorts of assurances will increase -- probably the first one would be Satoshi's 1m stash. Right now I don't think you'd get much support for it.

248 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Nov 2023

I've seen people talk about that. It makes sense, since it's basically just reconciling the de facto supply and the nominal supply.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cyberpunk02 23 Nov 2023

not keen on this idea, its prejudice against people with extreme low time preference ;)

423 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 23 Nov 2023

Ray Kurzweil predicts we'll become immortal by 2030.

It can be a pesky requirement indeed, having to pay a tx fee every goddamn century to retain your slice of infinity. Because if you miss it, you'll have to lift a finger again.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 23 Nov 2023

Sounds like something @petertodd would come up with lol. no offense, I love most your work.

272 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

The dynamics are the most fun thing, and also the hardest: the thought experiments like with the archeologists reveal something, but of course it's only a thought experiment. So as things evolve incrementally, how do these ideas manifest?

In more realistic scenarios, I think you're right, the archeologists would have a faction of supporters. This comes up in some of the RBF game trees, where the attacker / victim provide increasingly large "bribes" to the miners hoping to get them to select their preferred version of reality. In the limit case a pissed off victim gives the whole stash as a mining fee, I suppose.

905 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 22 Nov 2023 freebie

Both forks would exist alongside each other - the conservative / purist one and the 'fair' one, and the market would choose which to give value to.

"Fair" meaning what people consider fair. Now, generally bitcoiners consider it fair that those who work hard and spend less should be wealthier than those who work less or spend more. So in extreme cases, the archeologist's Cantillon effect-driven wealth would be viewed as extremely unfair.

Now I may be going off on a tangent, but there are many other ideas of fairness. For example, socialists might prefer a coin that results in a more equal wealth distribution. E.g. a Bitcoin-like network that airdrops money into your wallet every month and expires it if you don't spend it, to prevent accumulation. And these ideas of equality are quite popular if you look at politics. This can easily be achieved with a CBDC, but can they materialize in the form of a decentralized network like Bitcoin? I can see a hurdle here, namely it would have to ensure one person can only have / control one wallet, which would require a system of centralized identity issuance. Even if it's possible to overcome these seemingly technical obstacles (which may actually be more fundamental than technical), another question arises: who decides what money gets adopted and gets to dominate? Is it those most able to accumulate wealth after all? They surely would milk their SocialistCoin airdrops by selling them for BTC as soon as they land in their wallets, transferring value to what allows one to store value.

423 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 23 Nov 2023

Yet, fairness varies; socialists might favor a coin promoting wealth equality, like a Bitcoin network with monthly airdrops and expiry to prevent hoarding. Wealth accumulators might exploit such a system, converting their 'SocialistCoin' airdrops to Bitcoin, favoring a currency that maintains value.

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723 sats \ 3 replies \ @cyberpunk02 23 Nov 2023

😇 This discussion is great! Funny thought, it can become like democracy all over again. The archaeologist who finds mega stash just needs to keep in the favour/vote of the 51% most easily influenced people/node runners.... They would probably come up with a plan to spread out the spending and in this way would have a government/pharro like function.

459 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 23 Nov 2023

Exactly. Once you start playing it out in your mind, you realize this is all about social interaction; and at scale, basically, it's politics.

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423 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 24 Nov 2023

I love thinking about Bitcoin history and the far future.

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238 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Nov 2023

This is one of those places where game theory struggles, but that probably is the Nash equilibrium.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023

Good point.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ninjagrandma65 26 Nov 2023

Well, if we're hard forking, just hard fork to divide that last bitcoin as much as needed. The only thing that's actually important here is the divisibility. So long as it is divisible, you will have enough for the entire world, and this will avoid an inflation scenario. If it's not divisible... I guess there will be an issue. What can you do?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 23 Nov 2023

This would make a great story!

1744 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 27 Nov 2023 freebie

The scenario you describe is not purely hypothetical. In the Christmas 2017 feerate spike, I observed dozens of wallets having large amounts of funds tied up in UTXOs that were economically unspendable. The worst case was a wallet with over 550'000 2-of-3 P2SH UTXOs (up to 297 B to spend) of 10'000 ṩ, while feerates were above 30 ṩ/vB from early December until late January, peaking over 1'000 ṩ/vB.

You should consider how much it will cost to spend a UTXO in the future, how high the feerates might be, and what percentage of funds you are willing to lose to transaction fees for spending your funds in the future.

For example, if you are holding your funds in a P2WPKH input, the input weight will be 272 WU or 68 vB to spend it in the future. Let’s say you don’t want to spend more than 1% towards fees, even if you’d have to pay a feerate of 300 ṩ/vB.

Under the given assumptions, you would want all of your UTXOs to be at least:

68 vB × 300 ṩ/vB × 100 = 2'040'000 ṩ

Generically, the formula would be:

min_utxo_amount = input_weight × feerate / percentage

If your UTXOs are currently stored in a less blockweight efficient output type, or fragmented into smaller amounts, you may want to consolidate. Beware that consolidating outputs reduces your financial privacy in various ways. You could reduce the cost of your future inputs even further by using P2TR outputs which only take 57.5 vB to spend, although that incurs a higher cost for the outputs (see e.g. Is there an economic incentive to switch from P2WPKH to P2TR? on BSE).

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 27 Nov 2023

Thanks for the great response. The link about P2TR is something to chew on for sure.

However, these kinds of scenarios always strikes me as remarkably modest, given that actual btc use by real people (vs rabid bitcoiners or speculators) is extremely low, which I calibrate by the fact that my IRL normie friends outnumber my btc friends 30-1 at least, and even my btc friends transact in btc a fraction as often as they transact in fiat. So if btc succeeds by any realistic definition of the word success, it seems inevitable that there would be 10x the actual on-chain transacting, which we could estimate with shorthand as 10x fees.

In practice, rising fee pressure would really kick L2/L3 adoption in the ass; and maybe people would just keep their corn on exchanges; and maybe fee rates escalating that high would short-circuit the adoption process s.t. it strangled adoption in the crib. The system is dynamic and complicated, I understand that. But even so, under the "success" scenario, 300 sat / vbyte seems absurdly low to me.

What's your take to that take?

259 sats \ 11 replies \ @random_ 22 Nov 2023 freebie

Network fees impact what could be considered dust. For example, the no priority tier in mempool is 10 sats/vbyte. At current prices, that means tx's less than 5460 sat ($2) would cost more to move than they're worth. Is that dust?

solution' to this is to migrate transactions less than some giant sum to L2 of some type

One should increase their min_htlc size in a high fee environment because the risk of an expensive force closure. High min_htlc means that smaller payments will not be routed. I'm not sure L2 solves this problem.

8 sats \ 6 replies \ @ek 22 Nov 2023

One should increase their min_htlc size in a high fee environment because the risk of an expensive force closure. High min_htlc means that smaller payments will not be routed. I'm not sure L2 solves this problem.

Good point, there are some leaky abstractions on L2.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

Can you elaborate?

455 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 23 Nov 2023

Oh sorry, my reply just got zapped and that was a reminder about your reply, lol

With leaky abstractions, I just meant that we write software in layers to abstract underlying (complex) stuff away.

But more often than not, these abstractions are "leaky" since you still need to know some stuff about underlying layers as in this case, where you still need to care about onchain fees even though lightning should abstract that away. It does mostly but only mostly, thus it's a leaky abstraction.

Another example for a leaky abstraction is SQL. With SQL, we want to tell the database what we want (declarative) but we don't want to tell it how to do it (imperative). It should just take our query and the database engine should figure out what the best query plan is to deliver the results as fast as possible. When I write a SQL query, I don't want to care about which indices or JOINs should be used. But sometimes, the query gets really slow and then you need to dig into query plans and figure out what is going wrong.

But here are two good articles that explain it much better than I can:

From the second article:

As the systems we use become more and more complex, the number of abstractions that software developers must rely upon increases. Each abstraction attempts to hide complexity, allowing a software developer to create code that can “handle” all the variations in complexity that modern computing requires.

However, if Spolskys Law of Leaky Abstractions is true, then in order to create software that is reliable, software developers must learn many of the abstraction’s underlying details anyway.

Does that help?

436 sats \ 0 replies \ @rheedi0 23 Nov 2023

That's a great link, thanks for the share. Love this line:

the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.

434 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 23 Nov 2023

Yes and no. Yes, in that it was a nice description of leaky abstractions. No, in that I'm not clear what you mean about how L2 is an example of that.

Is it that, with all this mucking around with min_htlc settings, and even the details of worrying about managing UTXOs for dust, that we're having to care about things that normal people don't give a shit about because they just want to send their money around without thinking about it, as per your SQL example?

Now that I write it out, I'm guessing that's what you meant. But you can tell me if if I've got it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 23 Nov 2023

Is it that, with all this mucking around with min_htlc settings, and even the details of worrying about managing UTXOs for dust, that we're having to care about things that normal people don't give a shit about because they just want to send their money around without thinking about it, as per your SQL example?

Yes, basically.

L2 should abstract onchain fees away. But because force closures can happen, we still need to care about onchain fees.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 23 Nov 2023

Leaky abstractions in software mean layers meant to simplify complex tasks still require understanding of underlying details, like needing to know onchain fees in lightning networks or optimizing SQL queries despite its declarative nature.

3 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

For example, the no priority tier in mempool is 10 sats/vbyte. At current prices, that means tx's less than 5460 sat ($2) would cost more to move than they're worth. Is that dust?

The Unchained article linked to in the SN article I linked calls this "operative dust" which I like -- dust (like most things) is a relative term, that takes its meaning on prevailing circumstances. At the margin, UTXOs move in and out of the "dust" category.

I'm not sure L2 solves this problem.

I'm too dumb about the technical nuances of LN to say anything specific about it -- I was using L2 in the fully-general sense to mean any mechanism by which people / entities can transact that's not base chain.

228 sats \ 2 replies \ @random_ 22 Nov 2023

Thanks for the new vocabulary!

I'm too dumb about...

Fuck that noise. 80iq or not, you gotta have a growth mindset. Besides, I had just assumed you meant LN. Not sure about other L2's. For all I know liquid is the holy grail.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

Yeah, my mom always says that too. The growth mindset part, not the Liquid part. Although maybe her position on Liquid has evolved.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @random_ 22 Nov 2023

Forgot the saying but now I remember.

never forget your entire life that you are a divine and sacred and holy man

Or woman

238 sats \ 1 reply \ @Sasquatch 22 Nov 2023

I can sort of relate to that. I have some various alt's that I have sitting in various wallets, and some on side chains of ETH. In some cases I might I have $100 worth that I now want to flip to BTC. However, the transaction costs on ETH are so high that it makes no sense to move them now. I have to find a various ways to use these scraps. One way I found is that I was able to swap p2p for BTC. Huge win! So trx fee's to send are not nearly as high as to interact with defi. So, applying this logic of the BTC fee problem that is possible in some future universe... I can imagine having a wallet with say a 1mil sats, and let's say the fee would amount to 30% of the value. In this case you could give the wallet seed in exchange for some other value proposition. Or recover the seed in another wallet as a mode of transfer. Boom!

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

I can imagine having a wallet with say a 1mil sats, and let's say the fee would amount to 30% of the value. In this case you could give the wallet seed in exchange for some other value proposition.

Exactly -- real-life xfer of Opendimes, or some similar thing, is another kind of L2. I think the xferring of seeds wouldn't work by itself, as without sweeping contents on-chain to another address both the seller and buyer would now have access to them. But that general idea will be important, I expect.

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 22 Nov 2023

Maybe we should hear also opinions from @Murch and @petertodd regarding this. Is a very interesting topic.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 27 Nov 2023

There you go: #331225

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @rafaelasprilla334 22 Nov 2023

It will be increasingly rare to get a Bitcoin. There will come a time when sats will also be scarce and desirable to such an extent that they will be considered large fractions. It is advisable from my point of view to save a lot since in the future they will be worth much more

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 2 Dec 2023

Update from the future: here's another good discussion on this same topic.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @deerwhisper 22 Nov 2023

I do wonder if L1 tx fees stay relatively stable in BTC terms over time, even as the purchasing power of said txs increases. Would hate if I had some smaller UTXOs that became virtually unspendable. Samourai lets people have 50k sat outputs. Maybe that should be discouraged?

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Superbadger 22 Nov 2023

What we consider dust today won’t be dust in a few years ;)

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

Likely the reverse.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Superbadger 23 Nov 2023

How? If bitcoin 10x in 4 years the value of those 1000 sats onchain will grow more than the growth in fees

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Nov 2023

The issue isn't that btc won't be worth more, the issue is how many sats does it take to get a transaction on-chain, and how big a proportion of the UTXO will that be.

Have a look at the Unchained report I linked, it goes into it in detail.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 23 Nov 2023 freebie

But fees are denominated in bitcoin and have been stable in those terms for many years

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @linda024352 23 Nov 2023 freebie

For my part, I'm still collecting sats. I want to have some bitcoin pars my future🤠

37 sats \ 14 replies \ @Zepasta 22 Nov 2023 freebie

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355 sats \ 13 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

I know people like to make this argument, but it holds only within certain bounds. For instance, if 99.9% of btc was lost, it wouldn't benefit the remaining holders, it would be a referendum to the world that btc was such a delicate system as to be useless in practice. People wouldn't bother with it and would look elsewhere.

So there's a practical limit to this fixed supply thing. There are practical requirements to how widely distributed something needs to be before its viewed as legitimate by others. These are not technical issues, but rather psychological and sociological issues. This is one of the more important issues, imo, that I never see discussed.

71 sats \ 12 replies \ @nym 22 Nov 2023

We could just move to using micro-satoshis with the ones that are still available

284 sats \ 11 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023 freebie

I get it. There are technical solutions. But again, it's not a technical issue. (There are technical issues, this just isn't one of them.)

If the rest of the world lost all its btc in a tragic boating accident, and the only UTXO left was @Onions with his stack of 2 btc, would you be like: welp, I guess Onions is the only person in the world with any money, great for him, guess we'll start over monetizing this thing from nothing?

I'm guessing not. I wouldn't be.

This is basically the issue w/ ginormous wealth disparities, and it's why the "immaculate conception" of btc is so important. At some point people make the semi-rational decision that a world where some tiny subset has all the wealth sucks for them, so they might as well riot in the hopes of creating a better situation for themselves. Every so often you can watch it unfold in real-time.

494 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 22 Nov 2023

We live in a fascinating time to be able to watch the birth of a new form of money happen before our eyes.

52 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

That's for sure. Not just money, but all the AI stuff. Civilization is going to be re-architected while we watch. Insane.

I try to be more appreciative of the pure drama and spectacle of it, but it's hard sometimes.

28 sats \ 6 replies \ @Zepasta 22 Nov 2023 freebie

If the rest of the world lost all its btc in a tragic boating accident, and the only UTXO left was @Onions with his stack of 2 btc(...)

Bitcoin user base is rapidly growing. We are moving towards a Bitcoin Standard, where every person on earth will hold Bitcoin. Therefore, the assumption that the entire world will suddenly lose their Bitcoin all at once and only i will have the remaining 2 BTC while the rest of the users don't have any, doesn't make sense.

I totally agree with the main point of this discussion. Bitcoin might face some issues with fees in the future.

Imagine we are at year 2070, and your intire paycheck is equal to 100 Sats.

If the value of each individual sat becomes really high, regular people won't be able to keep their wealth on-chain because of the expensive transaction fees. Even opening L2 channels would be extremely difficult. Basically, most people would have no choice but to rely solely on L2 custodial solutions. I'm not sure how this problem will be solved exactly.

49 sats \ 5 replies \ @Zepasta 22 Nov 2023

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28 sats \ 4 replies \ @Zepasta 22 Nov 2023

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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @cyberpunk02 23 Nov 2023

I think the unkle jims LSP and Ark and cashu and fedi and liquids are being a little underestimated here. Even if mainchain fees stay really high, there will be some half self custody local situation that everyone can have... Also side note can liquid or a similar side chain suck up the dust UTXOs?

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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 22 Nov 2023

If the rest of the world lost all its btc in a tragic boating accident, and the only UTXO left was @Onions with his stack of 2 btc, would you be like: welp, I guess Onions is the only person in the world with any money, great for him, guess we'll start over monetizing this thing from nothing?

Why would Onions want to have 2 BTC when the rest of the world has a few sats? It would be an amount so astronomical, it would exceed the world's wealth by many orders of magnitude. He wouldn't be able to spend even a tiny fraction of it without it losing value. He would have spent it long before such a disparity arose.

28 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023

He wouldn't. The point of the thought exercise was to illustrate the consequences of an extremely kurtotic coin distribution.