Oddbean

If they take BTC out of circulation to use solely as bank collateral to back dollars, I'm not sure those of us with self custodied coins need to care, any more than we particularly care about coins locked up in wallets that ended up orphaned because they weren't properly backed up. Worst case scenario, their increased demand and the diminished supply may mean BTC's price gets high enough we have to seriously consider whether the satoshi really is the smallest unit of Bitcoin. The most insane valuation projection I've seen was $1 Billion USD BTC before 2040; at that price we'd really probably want to consider sub-satoshi units in order to facilitate microtransactions that really aren't even so micro anymore. Assuming of course that billion dollar valuation isn't simply because a cart of groceries costs $10,000... That's how I see it anyway; is there an angle you see I'm missing?

As for price: The entire wealth of the planet is currently $454T https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-wealth-distribution/ At $20M per BTC, 21M BTC would more or less equal that. What you decide could be a possible value of Bitcoin in the future should bear some resemblance to reality. As for it being used to back USD and becoming primarily an asset. That is definitely the trend, but not a good one. I see BTC being adopted globally as an asset as winning 50% of the battle. The other 50% is for it to be used as a currency. If this fails, then we get government regulated currency imposed on us for the rest of our lives. I want freedom money as well as freedom assets. I want us to control the flow of currency, not government. We have pretty much won the asset battle, we now fight the currency battle. It is very possible for us to loose this battle.

I see the big hurdles to it being used for money, rather than simply an asset, to lie in making transacting with it directly, and holding it directly, having as little friction as possible, because it was precisely the friction inherent in gold that allowed it to lose out to IOU's on it, and finally to fiat. Big issues I see right now are working the kinks out of the Lightning network, establishing an easy to understand and implement way to handle estate planning (at best this is something the real nerds have figured out how to do with multisig, but it's a clunky and arcane process), and overcoming concerns about possible loss from self custody. This last point may be one that we can only ever be approaching, rather than ever truly have in our grasp, given that people have these concerns even with fiat money -- many use bank accounts even when interest rates are near zero, and when they do most of their shopping locally, simply because with FDIC insurance, it's just safer to have the money in the bank than it is in your pocket, or even in a safe at home. You could get fireproof safes, sure, but this is where we really look at the cost of insuring your funds, and no safe is 100% foolproof. Honestly I half expect that rather than doing this work sufficiently ourself, seeing the FDIC's illusion of being foolproof destroyed with a monetary crisis is more likely. The math behind it doesn't work out -- their best case scenario is that at some point, when banks fail beyond what they can afford to bail out with existing funds, they'll simply be authorized to debase currency in a giant sweep -- worst case, they'll be forced to simply default, allowing insured claims to nonetheless go unpaid. While banks may have recognized the reality of counterparty risks between themselves in 2008, it will likely take this sort of crisis for the average person to seriously consider self custody less risky than using custodians to safeguard their wealth.

Or just use #Monero #xmr, or #litecoin (84 million) or #bch / Bitcoin Cash all 3 are far superior to Bitcoin Core's kooky ass, roundabout methods of attempting to be a daily currency, or even decentralized. https://www.audible.com/pd/Hijacking-Bitcoin-Audiobook/B0D1M2N1ZN?origin=serp_auto #ltc #hijackingbitcoin