[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 6:36 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

> On 2014-06-21 02:05, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
>
>> And what's better: this means that by your account the Bitcoin
>> transaction price is expected to regularly drop /dramatically/!
>>
>
> The cost of transactions is paid for by new money issue.
>
> The value of bitcoin is based on speculation that it will become more
> widely used for money that it currently is.
>
> So speculators are paying for transactions
>
> For it to be more widely used for money than it currently is means one
> hell of a lot more transactions.
>

And for there to be more real transactions and not just endless churn to
give the appearance that Bitcoin is taking off.

But one of the central conceits on which BitCoin is based is the idea that
it is 'proving' that the system works when the real BitCoin system has not
started yet. Everything will change when mining stops.

25 BTC every ten minutes is what, $1.8 million/day? I am pretty sure that
even within the ideology on which BitCoin is based, the injection of
$2/million a day of new currency into a system that maybe supports that
amount of external economic activity in a month must have a huge effect.
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