@fleventy No, if Coinbase goes away I'd just use some other price. Will take suggestions for which one exactly
Questions for the market creator @Odoacre
1. Does this go until 3000, or infinity?
2. Is it inflation adjusted or not?
@ElliotDavies sorry for late reply
If I'm around in 3000 I might extend it then, otherwise I hereby grant MM the ability to resolve it on my behalf
Not inflation adjusted
@KongoLandwalker The bitcoin community will just adopt a new quantum-resistant cryptography. The specs aren’t set in stone and there are both mechanisms and precedents to enable this.
@Rwin But this is about relative valuation and the outside view on fiat currencies holding their value for 1000 years is pretty grim
@JonathanRay That's a good point, but the outside view on cryptocurrencies holding their value for even a couple years is pretty grim.
@jack Copycat shitcoins look pretty grim but I don’t accept that as a reference class. Bitcoin is basically fiat currency minus the inflation and annoying gatekeepers. Even if the fed always achieved its 2% target that’d be a devaluation by a factor of 4*10^8 per millennium
@JonathanRay At 2% inflation it’ll only take 176 years without any increase in the cpi adjusted value of bitcoin
So whether or not this market resolves in 987 years, I don't believe bitcoin is going to make it that long.
Like modern currencies and unlike gold, bitcoin has no intrinsic value. You can make things out of gold, you can't make things out of bitcoin. This can make comparisons to gold deceiving. Like gold and unlike modern currencies, there is a finite total amount of bitcoin. This was a problem for gold because it was too rare to support economic growth - bitcoin gets around that by being much more precisely divisible than gold. Thus, like gold again, bitcoin deflates, encouraging people to hold on to it (or trade with an eye toward speculation) rather than spend or invest it. Bitcoin shares that problem right up until it crashes, and then, because there is no intrinsic value, whoever is left holding the bitcoin at the end loses.
Things that could cause Bitcoin to crash:
- someone solves the discrete logarithm problem
- sha256 is broken
- international communications breakdown
- many governments ban mining bitcoin
- many governments ban exchanging bitcoin for fiat currency
- cryptography-relevant quantum computers
- someone writes a worm to acquire a large fraction of the active bitcoin and then cashes out what they can.
- humanity expands beyond earth
None of those are guaranteed to happen, and none of them are guaranteed to crash bitcoin, but over 987 years one of them (or something else) probably will.
@Imuli All of those are either exceedingly unlikely or insufficient to cause a >90% crash, or both
I guarantee you that somebody is working on a worm to steal private keys / online wallet access. Possibly North Korea, but they seem more focused on traditional bank robbing at the moment. With the state of computer security it's just a matter of time.
Given that the majority of bitcoin trading is speculation, I expect there to be at least a gradual increase in regulation over time, and possibly an outright ban on personal trading it becomes enough of a problem.
Given that this question has been clarified to essentially "will bitcoin or the USD fail first?", there's plenty of uncertainty. But bitcoin is more susceptible to failure because it's primary value comes from speculation, not from people actually using it in trade.
Between now and the heat death of the universe? Certainly!
@JeanGabrielYoung it closes in 3000, 1000 years from now. Gold didn't fundamentally lose that much value in at least 5000 years...
I guess one could make an argument that it should resolve NO if USD ceases to exist, but then someone else could make a counterargument that if USD comes back into existence and BTC is worth less than $100 USD then, then that still counts for YES. Clearly the question is poorly thought through, anyway.
@jack The intent was to duplicate @itsTomekK's market /itsTomekK/will-bitcoin-ever-go-below-1000-aga In that it says if USD collapses it resolves to NO, but I seem to have dropped that clause by mistake in this copy. I would say in the case USD ceases to exist I would resolve this market as NO
@jack Without continuity I don’t think it’d really count as the same currency. It’d be a new fiat currency or shitcoin recycling an old brand name