What happens when all bitcoin is mined, societal collapse?

> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.

Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World).

I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.

You can buy a lot of pizzas with it now

Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those dollars to other people instead.

It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.

It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains taxes since you're not spending it.

The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer electronic cash system”

> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.

And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?

How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.

And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).

Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.

> Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is fine.

To those that have, more will be given. What about those that do not have?

> and smashing success of Bitcoin.

It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there are going to be some problems then.

> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.

Because the authoritarian government took over the previously independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were right.

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/turkeys-erdogan-sac...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_interventions_under_E...

Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.

There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.

BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.

It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.

Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.

If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.

Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.

But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:

    A shared history (which pseudonyms lack),

    An external authority (which decentralization avoids), or

    A system of credible, enforceable consequences (which requires identity or stake).

Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless:

    There’s a future cost to cheating (reputation loss that matters),

    There’s a benefit to cooperation over time (e.g. recurring jobs),

    Or there's a credible mechanism to enforce fairness (e.g. escrow and arbitration).

But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.

More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:

    You trust X because X has a good rep.

    X has a good rep because others say so.

    You trust those others because…?

Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.

And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.

In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.

Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.

It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.

But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.

We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:

    In Weimar Germany, the collapse of political and institutional trust after WWI led to hyperinflation, with prices doubling every few days.

    In Zimbabwe, trust in government policy collapsed alongside the economy, and the currency became worthless.

    In Venezuela, rampant inflation was fueled not just by bad economic policy but by the public’s loss of faith in any institutional ability to right the course.

The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.

Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.

So the uncomfortable truth is this:

    Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.

Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.

And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.

The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.