I'd suggest looking at the BTC chart with logarithmic scaling. I'm not saying it won't happen, but you can distinctly see how the exponential growth has greatly slowed down over time, so the move from 100k to a million is definitely not the same in terms of momentum and likelihood as the one from 10k to 100k.

(Of course that was under the previous 'house rules'; who knows what announcement will come out of the White House tomorrow.)

>look at the BTC chart with logarithmic scaling

Yes I've spent over a decade placing lines of best fit, usually in log-land; it all still seems early-phase of the S-curve (which I agree: you're correct about new adoption timelines; it's just not now) [0].

Governments are in early implementations of Bitcoin Strategic Reserves — which I will predict should increase the slope of the aforementioned log_line (i.e. BTC growth becomes even faster) as citizen access increases.

----

Honestly: I'm surprised my above bitcoin comment hasn't been further-downvoted... simply because HN-folks have "blasted" me for years on my lived experiences within bitcoin ecosystem. At present, I too am (still) anti-alt-coins =D

[Harrelson_wipes_tears_with_hundies.GIF]

[0] https://imgur.com/Yw9a8Pu

it's deceptive - the curve on the logarithmic chart looked the same when bitcoin was 100x less than it is now

Well, no, you can see that the rate of growth is slowing over time and the time spans for each 10x are getting longer, which would be what would you expect if we were getting closer to some kind of 'point of saturation'. Again, not saying we won't see 1 million, but I wouldn't use the "well we've seen a 10x five times now!" as an argument for thinking it's a sure thing.

Nothing is a certainty. But most people (especially on this site!) would argue that bitcoin not reaching $1M is close to one.

Reality is that the market cap of gold is now around $25T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at $1.5M/BTC, based on estimated 4M BTC lost forever. And bitcoin has way better monetary fundamentals than gold...

Additionally, adoption of new technology generally follows an S-curve.

>market cap of gold is now around $25T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at $1.5M/BTC

Market cap of gold is ~$22T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at 1.05M/BTC

>based on estimated 4M BTC lost forever

This is irrelevant to the conversation — even "lost" bitcoin are still included in the marketcap calculation of an asset.

>adoption of new technology generally follows an S-curve

I accept your premise, but IMHO bitcoin is still just getting started.

----

Based on my bitcoin usage (since 2012), bitcoin seems to have doubled approximately every eighteen months. Under this anecdotal observation, it could be just five years to $1M [0]

[0] but of course past performance doesn't predict future [1]

[1] Time IN the market beats timING the market — excited to keep waiting =P

> This is irrelevant to the conversation — even "lost" bitcoin are still included in the marketcap calculation of an asset.

If assets are destroyed or forever lost, they essentially no longer exist and so have no effect on the market cap.

If all but 1 bitcoin were lost, the total supply would then be 1 bitcoin. From then on, the 21M figure would just be an arbitrary number with no relevance to real world supply and demand. The world would be fighting over 100M sats.

> I accept your premise, but IMHO bitcoin is still just getting started.

Agree completely. It's clear from this website alone (filled with people of above-average technical knowledge and intelligence) that most of the world has no idea what it really is yet (they think they know). People who understand both the inherent flaws of Keynesian economics and the technological aspects of bitcoin are few and far between. But both are becoming increasingly obvious as each year passes, along with bitcoin's robustness for which time is only true test.

And Retail has not even started buying yet, google trends show low interest.

> in response to the need to improve military mobility

lol, I guess that this is only half of the equation, the other being to fairly obviously reduce military mobility for another class of vehicles.

Your kids go to a school where phones are still allowed on campus?

Wow, time to move them.

All this point to is the fact that there needs to be a better testing system for student's progress.

Lock them in a room for 4 hours to 6 hours with a list of carefully crafted questions to answer in writing (rather than ticking boxes) with no access to a computer.

See how AI will help them get out of that one.

And testing student progress on "home" work, give me a break. It has always been broken.

Way before AI existed, all you had to do is hire someone to do the work on your behalf, all the more easy if you're born in a family with money. Nothing new under the sun.

> there are rules for 2/3 of cases

LOL.

And are they rules to remember which word falls in the 2/3rd ?

Nope, but it's not so different to irregular plural forms or verbs in english.

Afaik: At some point in the history of the language there would(?) have been rules for these nouns, but not today.

> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French

The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).

Yeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem.

Good times.

> I envy Chinese and Japanese;

Up until the point you have to read and write them.

Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.

At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.

Hangul fits Korean like a glove, at least.

> simplification

Have you maybe considered the idea that a simplification might actually be an improvement?

As in: a language's first and foremost role is to communicate ideas and feelings as efficiently and clearly as possible, and with the broadest possible reach and not to impress the plebs with how sophisticated your sentences can become.

In that light, which of {English, German} best fits the bill in your opinion?

This very classical piece is nothing short of admirable.

Really funny, very well written, and most of all, while exaggerated: all true.

German is laden with a ton of fairly useless and purely ornamental flourishes, it's truly a pain to master.

Every step of the way, your mind is haunted by this recurring thought: "why in heaven's name would they inflict this to themselves?"

It's even worse than French if you count the number of genders.