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Siempre tengo en la cabeza la respuesta de Hal Finney al anuncio de la puesta en circulación por parte de Satoshi de la versión 0.1 de Bitcoin el 10/01/2009:
High price per bitcoin was even speculated, or at least tossed around as a potential, back in 2009.
After Satoshi announced the release of Bitcoin v0.1, Hal Finney replied, citing amongst other things the following:
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One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even
ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it
at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable
argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins.
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
Hal
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015004.htmlSeems to have been on the mind of core people around the beginning, although through Hal’s words.
Note: Hal performed his exercise considering a 20M bitcoin supply. Whether that was a simplification, an oversight (strange, as 21M was mentioned by Satoshi on the post Hal answered to), or due to inner knowledge on 1M bitcoins never being movable (i.e. lost or thrown away keys) is a wonder …
Es decir, que la componente especulativa, aunque fuese de la mano de un ejercicio teórico, quedó reflejada en los comentarios posteriores de Hal, posiblemente orientados a incentivar el interés por el minado de bitcoin, pero referenciando cifras que superan todo lo que hemos visto estos años …
Recalcaría nuevamente la referencia de Hal a 20M de BTCs, como si ya descartase 1M por algún motivo (las teóricamente minadas por Satoshi), o bien simplemente fue para simplificar el ejercicio realizado.