If useful, the US Department of the Treasury can issue a coin or bill with a value of any denomination, including .005 USD, and so is “infinitely divisible”.
Bitcoin divisibility is limited, by design, to 0.00000001 BTC (1 Satoshi)
Whether this is “enough” is very difficult to answer definitively. If the demand for BTC is greater than the supply, the value of BTC will rise until supply and demand reach equilibrium. If the demand outpaces supply, holders (“HODLERS”) have less incentive to trade and more incentive to keep their BTC, because the value of their BTC increases.
If demand gets too great, few to no holders trade, because they get more value by doing nothing, and trades involving BTC slow or stop completely. (We can think of this as kind of a “consensus attack” by “store of value” advocates on the “medium of exchange” advocates.) The demand doesn’t go away, though, so supply and demand can’t reach equilibrium.
Eventually this would lead people to start using something else as a medium of exchange, perhaps just bartering at first, eventually settling on something common. So now we have a problem: BTC demand has been satisfied by another “medium of exchange”. But what happens to the “store of value” part of BTC if it is no longer the “medium of exchange”? Do coins become like works of art, traded infrequently for great sums? Or do they become worthless?
> If useful, the US Department of the Treasury can issue a coin or bill with a value of any denomination, including .005 USD, and so is “infinitely divisible”.
And how much does that cost? I bet it's more than 5 cents.
> Bitcoin divisibility is limited, by design, to 0.00000001 BTC (1 Satoshi)
Not by design, that's an implementation details that can easily be changed in the future if 1 sat starts to become valuable enough to make a difference.
> and trades involving BTC slow or stop completely.
Do you have an example of a single commodity in the history of humanity that simply stopped being traded because it became "too valuable"?
I can't even understand how that makes sense, if it's valuable some people will want to sell it and get something that is more useful to them, like a house, a car, whatever. People don't commonly decide to hold an asset until their death bed.
> But what happens to the “store of value” part of BTC if it is no longer the “medium of exchange”?
The problem is that when markets get turbulent, they can suddenly shift to going the other direction. Instead of everyone wanting to buy, suddenly no one wants to be the last one out the door. And with Bitcoin, what authority is going to stop the panic?
> What happened to Gold?
I suppose it depends on which branch of Bitcoin you're on. Are we talking about store of value or medium of exchange?
Soros' comments on gold are helpful.
> “Typically, a self-reinforcing process undergoes orderly corrections in the early stages, and, if it survives them, the bias tends to be reinforced, and is less easily shaken. When the process is advanced, corrections become scarcer and the danger of a climactic reversal greater”.
What commodities ceased being traded during the Great Depression?
> Are we talking about store of value or medium of exchange?
Mostly store of value for now, both when adoption improves and LN support is more widespread. Eventually the base layer will also need some capacity bumps.
> Soros' comments on gold are helpful.
A multi millennium bubble? Can't get more unprecedented than that.
In case you're not familiar with it, the Great Depression was a period of deflation.
I'm guessing you didn't bother reading Soros' comments I linked. Or maybe you're pretending you don't know the typical usage of "bubble" is in this context?
Bitcoin divisibility is limited, by design, to 0.00000001 BTC (1 Satoshi)
Whether this is “enough” is very difficult to answer definitively. If the demand for BTC is greater than the supply, the value of BTC will rise until supply and demand reach equilibrium. If the demand outpaces supply, holders (“HODLERS”) have less incentive to trade and more incentive to keep their BTC, because the value of their BTC increases.
If demand gets too great, few to no holders trade, because they get more value by doing nothing, and trades involving BTC slow or stop completely. (We can think of this as kind of a “consensus attack” by “store of value” advocates on the “medium of exchange” advocates.) The demand doesn’t go away, though, so supply and demand can’t reach equilibrium.
Eventually this would lead people to start using something else as a medium of exchange, perhaps just bartering at first, eventually settling on something common. So now we have a problem: BTC demand has been satisfied by another “medium of exchange”. But what happens to the “store of value” part of BTC if it is no longer the “medium of exchange”? Do coins become like works of art, traded infrequently for great sums? Or do they become worthless?