Economics – The value of bitcoin

I have been involved in bitcoin mining from the early days, but with mining becoming more and more difficult, I have decided to not expend any more regular money on the endeavor, instead to concentrate on bitcoin faucets.

So I was looking at an app called BitMaker on my smartphone, an app that trades viewing ads for small amounts of bitcoin called Satoshi.

A Satoshi is one unit at the 8th decimal place, or 0.00000001 BTC. Since there will be a maximum of 21 million bitcoin ever mined, and there are roughly 7.5 billion people on the planet, and growing, we will need approximately 0.0028 BTC, or 280,000 Satoshi, per person at the current population levels.

To figure out what it takes at a minimum to survive in the USA, including food, rent or mortgage, utilities, etc, I will be looking back to 1964. There is a reason for this I will get into shortly.

In 1964, you could live at the transition point from lower to middle class, pay all your bills, live in a decent house, drive one car, have one TV, and not be at the brink of poverty. It meant being frugal. The minimum wage in 1964 was $1.25 and it would provide that level of minimum living on ONE income. FIVE quarters (25 cent coins for those outside of the USA) per hour would pay that level of income!

Now, the reason why I chose 1964 is the fact that there still was silver in quarters, 90% to be exact. If we go to http://Coinflation.com, we see a single pre-1965 quarter is worth $2.6403 in 2015 dollars. So 5 quarters would be $13.20, that is more than today’s minimum wage in most areas of the USA. That is $27,459.12 per year in 2015 dollars. Back in 1964 you could live decent, today that makes you poor and in some cases eligible for welfare!

But let’s assume that today we COULD eek out a living on $28,000 per year. I rounded the number to make the math easy. As you saw above, there are about 280,000 Satoshi per person, per year, so, that would make each Satoshi worth $0.10 or 10 cents. If this is the case, then 10 Satoshi make $1, and one bitcoin would be worth 10 million US dollars.

Right now, BitMaker allows me to bring in around 16000 Satoshi a week, currently, at about $280 per BTC, that is about 4-5 cents, however, if bitcoin would be worth what it should be as described above, this would represent US$1600, a significant amount of income.

I wrote the above over the last two weeks in short bursts without posting it here. So then today I read an article on beta Kim Dotcom http://betanews.com/2015/08/24/as-stock-markets-tumble-kim-dotcom-recommends-bitcoin-again/ recommends investing into bitcoin due to the current stock market down turns in China, EU, and USA.

So, if bitcoin ever achieves it’s real value, I can totally see my currently meager income of a few Satoshi here and there add up to significant retirement savings. $1600 per day, could turn out to be $584,000 in the future.

Are you acquiring a few Satoshi today?

This article was first posted on my blog at back in August of 2015.
https://rmolby.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/economics-the-value-of-bitcoin/

As we all know, bitcoin is currently around $560-580, about twice the amount I posted above, this would end up being then closer to $3200 a month! That is $38,400 a year, a decent income. Now we are talking!

If you are not earning some sort of crypto-currency, then you are wrong!

Related articles on SteemIt:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@andrej1/10-awesome-bitcoin-facts