We recently had a discussion about whether 1 satoshi could be worth $1. here. My conclusion to this was no, not in todays Dollars and in future Dollars there needs to be a lot of inflation happening to be realistic.
So, I want to give you another approach how to estimate how much money you will have in a hyperbitcoinized world.
I do not want to work with the countervalue of goods and services, investments or the current M2 money supply. The issue with these estimates is that they work with a lot of assumptions. The world might work completely differently with a hard money - multiples of companies, the margins they charge that consumers pay, consumers consumerism patterns etc. all of these things would be unclear. I'm sure you have your opinions on them - but the truth is that we genuinely just don't know.
Instead, let's use the number of humans and number sats. The beauty of this approach is that I do not have to put the dirty word "Dollar" in my mouth. Another advantage of using the number of humans will change the absolute numbers but not the money distribution curve through the economy. Thus, we can calculate with the number of humans on earth right now and the number of sats you own right now.
If you want to make your own estimations you'll only have to change how steep the distribution curve is.
So, according to the Worldometer we have about 8 billion people. This is not a good source, I admit, but it's an interesting website I wanted to mention and 8 billion is more or less where most sources expect it to be around. There are 21 million Bitcoin - we could calculate with 18 million or even 14 billion since many Bitcoin are probably lost forever - this is also something we cannot know and cannot adjust for - so let's use 21 million.
With an equal distribution (unrealistic, hear me out first) we would have 0.002625 Bitcoin per person. Do you own 262500 Sats? If yes, congratulations, you are an average human in an hyperbitcoinized utopia with equal distribution.
Let's use a distribution that is more realistic. Imagine the top 10% of people own 50% of all Bitcoin. Sounds unequal but is still more well distributed than our current fiat system. Still, to me that sounds like the most realistic and most utopian and optimistic scenario - maybe you disagree, tell me in the comments. Also, it's a nice round number and easy to imagine. That would be 800 million people owning 10.5 million Bitcoin. The average human in the 10% of this utopia own 0.013125 Bitcoin. Idk about you guys but this sounds amazing to me. Only 1.3m sats buy me a place in the 10%? Awesome.
The conclusion at this point should be that for all of us that getting more people onboard is much more important than stacking a lot yourself. Tell your friends and family that low monthly savings rate with DCA already is a lot - they don't have to be crazy maxis mortgaging their houses to buy Bitcoin like Michael Saylor did say.
Finally, let's roughly try out a few numbers from wealth distribution of the current US. The 1% roughly owns 30% of all wealth. You own 0.07875 Bitcoin? Congrats, Mr Fancypants 1%. The 50th to 90th percentile own roughly as much and with only 0.00196875 you're in the solid (upper-) middle class.
Cheers!
What a bear! Sat to dollar parity will come faster than you think.
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I think getting to 250,000 sats in a year (starting now) is a feasible target for the average Joe (including myself). The bitcoin/population ratio is just gonna get wider by the day, so getting to a quarter million sats within the next 12 months would ensure an increasing amount of crypto wealth, even if it doesn't get me into the fancypants club.
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You can get there in a year just by posting good content on Stacker News 😀
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Right on! ;-)
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I like this approach as well. Thanks for making me feel like a fancy pants rich guy
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I like this more real-world approach as well. If every human on the planet could have an equal slice of everything that exist (yes i know, free-market doesn't allow that), you can extrapolate a simple sat number out of it.
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105 sats \ 1 reply \ @a 29 Jul 2022
Haha! The url link made me think of a new Bitcoin metric called "persatile", sort of like like percentile but describing your ranking in the bitcoiniverse
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I smell a new project coming up!
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103 sats \ 1 reply \ @a 29 Jul 2022
I think a more realistic distribution is that the top 1% owns 99% of the Bitcoin. Consider the whales with 1,000+ BTC... Surely a Bitcoin world will have unequal distribution.
Could you crunch the numbers for this case?
We can get a rough idea of the distribution from here https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html but of course we all know people can have multiple addresses.
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Multiple people also have one address (exchanges holding users' BTC in consolidated addresses). So on-chain analysis is very flaky for getting BTC distribution.
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I think cent sat parity in US terms is fair value, because unit bias, during the last ATH, bitcoin hit cent sat parity in my local currency the South African rand and since it's pulled back so to me I feel like I am getting a massive discount already and I can't stop stacking.
I think as more currencies hit cent sat parity people will see it's the better unit of measurement to hold and they continue to capitulate to it. Having 10 million sats is going to put you in a solid position in the future
And with the amount of bitcoin lost each year it only hardens your position, take the time to stack while others are distracted you will thank yourself
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With scarce money 2 things can happen
  1. Deflationary pricing of consumables / consumer products
  2. Market pricing of other desirable assets
Bitcoin absorbs monetary premium over time
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Keep the FUD coming, I want some cheap bitcoin!
Also, it's the top 1% that will own 95% of all the bitcoin, and that top 1% will be mainly Americans, Europeans and Japanese. There will still be plenty to go around to the rest of the world because of fractionalization. You can't make calculations making any assumptions about equal distribution of anything. If that were even remotely true, bitcoin would be worth the same as seawater or air, nothing. The purpose of a money is to account for the unequal distribution of value.
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"Whales currently hold 24% of the supply.
Holdings as at 1st Jan of past years: 2021 - 27% 2020 - 27% 2019 - 29% 2018 - 32% 2017 - 39% 2016 - 44% 2015 - 46% 2014 - 48% 2013 - 52% 2012 - 54%
Excludes Satoshi's coins (assumed lost), exchanges, ETFs, and public companies. (Exchanges, ETFs and public company holdings are excluded as their BTC are owned by a multitude of individuals/shareholders.)"
In fact bitcoin is diffusing rather than aggregating. Because, in part, in a Proof of Work system, greater holdings don't generate greater holdings. The other part is the capped supply.
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FUD? equal distribution?
My guy, you haven't read the post. have you?
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I agree your approach gives a simpler way to calculate, it's your 10% / 50% split I think is way off. Your assumption that a hard money world will work completely differently than a fiat world is a good one, but it could go either direction. Given we know fiat encourages spending, we can assume hard money encourages saving. All things equal, this seems logical, but this is a notion from an inflationary world (even with gold) and hard money could turn everything upside down multiple times.
Regardless my original intent stands, to underestimate the value if bitcoin is adding Uncertainty compared to "HODL Bank" which is on a 1sat=1BigLieMoney trajectory.
When I say more FUD in a bear market is good, I mean it. It's not a slight against you.
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The conclusion at this point should be that for all of us that getting more people onboard is much more important than stacking a lot yourself. Tell your friends and family that low monthly savings rate with DCA already is a lot - they don't have to be crazy maxis mortgaging their houses to buy Bitcoin like Michael Saylor did say.
Define "much more important". For me to life comfortably, retire early, or becomes rich enough to be a benefactor towards the causes I care about, I need to stack more sats.
I'm a firm believer that everyone buys Bitcoin at the price they deserve. Some people simply aren't ready to start stacking until Bitcoin is $500k+ or until the USD is facing 50%+ price inflation annually.
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This answers how the money would be distributed. But how much buying power that is still an open question.
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For that I'd like to plug my own analysis, #49434
Summary: in a hyperbitcoinized world, assuming velocity of transactions stays the same, 1 bitcoin should buy $3.4 million worth of goods & services, valued at today's dollars.
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This is a really eye-opening perspective - well written. 🚀
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Looking forward to being part of the historically hated 1%. Lets go!
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Interesting thought experiment overall what matters most is the cost of goods and services. Bitcoin is hoping to fix price signals and have true cost stability across all the complex economies. If Bitcoin fails to do this then being in the 1% of “wealth” won’t matter.
Wealth is the goods and services a currency can buy you. If a family of 4 can live comfortably on a constant sat salary that reflects the value and productivity they bring to the world then you can say bitcoin solved the problem of fiat money
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One satoshi could be worth a dollar or any other amount.
Bitcoin has price insensitive buyers, transaction service purchasers and the DCA crowd.
Thus if a commodity has price-insensitive buyers, it is sellers who set the price.
And if the species was capable of even meagre cooperation, bitcoin's exchange rate could be anything holders choose it to be.
The majority of UTXOs are long term holders (anything from 155 days or more) and yet a minority of "traders" cause the overwhelming majority of volatility and price destruction.
Never the less, every trade is a chance for a long term holder to buy and only sell for more, at some time in the distant future.
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даже если ты имеешь 0.01 биткоина. тебе придётся его отправить и заплатить комиссию. этим все сказано. нет времени спорить и доказывать. в будущем вы обязательно это поймете. SN
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