Overnight. Omg. Another person with a brain. Good to meet you. I'm not one for predicting things. But 2020 is a ways off. I believe Government intervention will destroy this thing before then. Already governments are claiming it as a way for criminals to Transact criminal activity. I compare this to the US government shutdown online poker claiming it was a way to launder money
It is not necessarily a prediction. It is just the theorized (or predicted) time that the final bitcoin will be found. (Just checked again, the projection is in the early 2100 range. Sorry.) That is when the shit will hit the fan, so-to-speak. You will then have a currency with a fixed amount of units available (21,000,000 units) with no value-basis. So let us replace bitcoins with acorns, for example. If there are only 21,000,000 acorns in the world, and there are no more trees left to make new acorns, and there are no more acorns to be found because all the squirrels ate the buried acorns, then what possible value can the acorn have? Nobody is going to care about the acorn because it has no value-basis. There is not more to be found, and there is no more to be made. It thus becomes worthless. There can be no speculation on the acorn because no more can be had. The only thing one can do to increase the value of the acorn is to start destroying other folks' acorns, to increase the value of their own acorns. Eventually you get to the point where there are no more acorns to destroy. So now the acorn is in a holding pattern. There are only a few people who have acorns. But why would anyone else want the acorn, since it represents no value compared to what currency the rest of the world has been basing worth upon? Sorry, I am not making sense. Tired. Bedtime.
The other side of the digital coin values the transparency and the finite limit of bitcoins possible. By having a limited number, it's structure mitigates inflation. The value would go the way of fractionalization - imagine buying a house with 1/100th of a bitcoin. Given it's place in history, it could go the way of rare collectables. That or like other extinct fiat currencies go the way of the wheelbarrow. The transparency is an obstacle to those that profit by opaqueness. I imagine rapid adoption would have to provide the utility similar to that which the development of mobile phones ignited. What can someone do with bitcoin that they can't do with cc's, debit cards, applepay and paypal?
There are many, but I think your question is rhetorical. Here's one: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/man-accidentally-makes-13-million-buying-a-house-with-bitcoin-cm738868
@Sprout, thank you for the compliment. But the answer to your question, I already wrote in that same post: One word for people who say it's not rare, because you can make so many copies. Yes indeed. But it's not the copy that counts: it's the number of users and use cases, and more importantly: it's the number of accountants that work on the Ledger to keep it safe, immutable and irreversible. In this, bitcoin excels. The bitcoin-ledger has incredibly much Hashing-power which technologically cannot be switched to any other crypto-ledger. Nevertheless, other Ledgers like Ethereum and Dash are valuable in their own feature set. So yes. There are currently more than 700 ledger copies and more will follow. And most will fail as well. Just as there are (were) many copies of Facebook in the world. Only a few will survive because only those can offer the features needed by their users. The most important feature for a crypto-currency is immutability and irreversibility. And this can ONLY be accomplished by the ledger which has the most hashing-power (the accountants with their miners). It's actually extremely easy (cheap) to attack 95% of the current 700 ledgers (I did it once myself with just a few computers). An attack means to stop it working and unravel the whole ledger, making it corrupt. Only a very few have enough hashing-power to defend against such an attack. And for Bitcoin it's just impossible (you would need billions of dollars for only just making a hiccup, but cannot bring it down). Also the total market is large enough for having about 10 Ledgers with each having a specific uses-case. Bitcoin will claim the currency use-case for now (but might become the ledger for all high-value assets, just because it's the safest Ledger of all). Ethereum will claim the smart-contract use-case. And maybe DASH or Monero for darkmarkets and criminals.... how knows.
So you guys don't think a payment invention that can process 7 transactions per second is the future?
Of course not! And you know that very well also. I know you are just trolling here, but are also aware of the solutions which will be released as soon as SigWit is implemented (but that's a whole other story).
Fair enough, so how many transactions will it be able to handle per second after the improvements? Anything less than a few thousands is kaka...
Is billions of transactions per day good enough for you? I think so, as it's more than what's possible by Visa (). This video is already dated, they have working code already and are just waiting for a fix of the Bitcoin-malleability-bug. Which will be solved the moment that SegWit is implemented (hopefully this Summer).