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gwern comments on Making money with Bitcoin? - Less Wrong
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After thinking about it and looking at the current community and the surprising amount of activity being conducted in bitcoins, I estimate that bitcoin has somewhere between 0 and 0.1% chance of eventually replacing a decent size fiat currency, which would put the value of a bitcoin at anywhere upwards of $10,000 a bitcoin. (Match the existing outstanding number of whatever currency to 21m bitcoins. Many currencies have billions or trillions outstanding.)
Cut that in half to $5000, and call the probability an even 0.05% (average of 0 and 0.1%), and my expected utility/value for possessing a coin is $25 a bitcoin (5000*0.005).
My laptop's GPU gets ~49 megahashes a second (apparently I have one of the best-suited ATI cards), and another calculator says the average time to cracking a block of 50 coins is 39 days - or ~1 coin a day, averaged. So my expected utility per day is ~$25 a day.
At an estimate, it took about 3 hours to get
poclbmrunning properly; I value my time at about $10 an hour, so my time will be repaid after 2 or 3 coins, and I'll have a healthy expected profit after one block of 50 coins.How robust is this calculation? Let's assume that I reinstall once a year and spend 3 hours every time. (Hopefully installation will get easier as libraries mature, but I will also waste time checking in on progress and writing comments (like this one!).)
Difficulty will go up, of course. Let's assume over the next year I'll mine 0.2 bitcoins per day on average. That's ~74 coins rather than >365 coins, and 74*25=$1850 in exchange for $30 of time.
To make this a net loss for me, you can play with the numbers. We already cut the payoff by 80% by dropping the daily rate to 0.2 from >1, but how much more do we need to cut before it's a loss?
Your basic equation is 74*(probability*payoff)<=30. If we fix payoff at 500, then the probability is 74*(500*x)<=30, 37000*x<=30, x<=0.08%. So even with a very small and then halved payoff, and a small and then cut by 80% accumulation rate, I still calculate a net positive expected utility of mining.
Mencius Moldbug weighs in with his version of this argument:
Is there any reason why Bitcoin cannot co-exist with other similar e-money schemes? If e-money in general is a winner, then the fact that there can only be 21 million Bitcoins in particular is no longer relevant.
Having learned more, I can point out that Bitcoin can co-exist, but those other e-moneys must have some trait Bitcoin doesn't. It's like evolutionary niches. My current example is an interesting little system I'm GPU mining for right now, Namecoin (homepage). The scarce things that Namecoin is decentralizedly allocating are domain names (.bit), rather than tokens used as money - not direct competition.
The success of one e-money makes life more difficult for the others; there are incentives to standardize (witness the EU, or how some countries peg their currency to the dollar - or just use the dollar).
But that's what I thought I was talking about... (well, actually, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but you've enlightened me on money issues before). What if someone comes along soon and creates another e-currency with some credible generation mechanism but without the hard cap that Bitcoin has and pegs it to Bitcoin at some appropriate time?
By definition, if there is no hard cap and people are generating, then a peg can't be maintained to another currency with a hard cap - basic Pigeonhole Principle. Can't uniquely match n+m items to just n slots. I'm not really seeing what you're asking after.
Ah yes, I see. I didn't think carefully about how a peg would actually be maintained.
Suppose the new currency does have a hard cap -- suppose I copy the Bitcoin scheme and create Cyan-coin, of which there will eventually be 21 million. Even if I don't personally maintain reserves of the two currencies to keep the exchange rate pegged, didn't I just double the supply of e-money, thereby halving the purchasing power of an e-coin?
Only if people use it and make plans on it. You could make a trillion different Cyan-coin currencies, and if they never left your computer, would they affect anything at all? Of course not.
The purchasing power of a random bitcoin only halves if people run out and start using Cyan-coin in exactly the same quantities as Bitcoin. Otherwise, the actual purchasing power is much less, set by the exchange rate - obviously Cyan-coin is not equal to a Bitcoin in PPP if the exchange rate is 100:1.
I imagine that early uptake of a Bitcoin clone would be facilitated if people thought that the hard cap on Bitcoins proper would cause the scheme to have undesirable properties as a currency.
Surely. But that's not the case, as people think the presence of a hard cap is one of the valuable traits of Bitcoin.