355 sats \ 13 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Stranded sats bitcoin
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.
We could just move to using micro-satoshis with the ones that are still available
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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.
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We live in a fascinating time to be able to watch the birth of a new form of money happen before our eyes.
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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.
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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.
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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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The coins still need to get onto L2 in the first place. That's a transaction, so if it's dust, it's not getting on.
But as a general strategy, getting your stash onto some L2 somehow is the way.
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getting on L2 via proof of dust? (such sinful language) 😅
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.
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He wouldn't. The point of the thought exercise was to illustrate the consequences of an extremely kurtotic coin distribution.
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