There are 3 quadrillion times more atoms of gold than "satoshis"

[Akim]

There are about 210,000,000 kg of gold in the world.
Each kilogram of gold has 30,573,183,730,000,000,000,000 atoms.

So, there are 6,420,368,583,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of gold on Earth.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30573183730000000000000+*+210000000

That is about six "nonillion" atoms (6 thousand billion billion billion).

On the other hand, there are 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis.

So there are much more atoms of gold in the world than satoshis.
Actually, there are 3,057,318,373,000,000 more atoms of gold on Earth than satoshis.
(about, 3 quadrillion times more).

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6420368583300000000000000000000+/+2100000000000000

That is: 152,865,918,650,000,000% (percent) more atoms of gold than satoshis... Way more!!!

-remotemass

 

[Mathew]

And...?

Atoms aren't spendable units last time I checked. What's the relevance of this comparison? Surely it would make more sense to compare troy ounces instead of atoms.

 

[Ayaan]

Gold should be measured reasonably like DooMAD points out. Moreover, I read an article by Winklevoss just yesterday where he pointed out that the amount of gold in the world remains unknown especially if we take into consideration nearby asteroids rather than just Earth. And it's better to know that something is definitely scarce than to rely on approximate information. There was a gold crisis leading to devaluation when a big amount of it suddenly appeared in one place before, so it could well happen again, only on global scale. The good thing about Bitcoin is that nobody can ever find any more Bitcoins anywhere in the universe, so it's more predictable.

 

[Edison]

And...?

Atoms aren't spendable units last time I checked. What's the relevance of this comparison? Surely it would make more sense to compare troy ounces instead of atoms.

Yeah, satoshis also kinda aren't spendable units if you think about it. To send 1 satoshi how much would you have to pay in fees, the same? At least 1 satoshi right? If that's the case then it's not practical to have 1 satoshi be worth more than 4 or 20 USD, doesn't this give bitcoin a hard cap on maximum possible price?

 

[Mauricio]

Carrying around Sats is way less heavy than carrying around atoms.

 

[Moshe]

An interesting comparison, although not practical. However, even if we compare a kilogram of gold and bitcoin, we get an interesting situation. According to these figures, there are 210 million kilograms of gold in the world. That is, for each of the 21 million bitcoins, there are ten kilograms of gold. If we compare these measures with each other, taking into account the fact that even an ounce of gold has a price of about $ 2,000, it turns out that gold is much more expensive than bitcoin.

 

[Gustavo]

To send 1 satoshi how much would you have to pay in fees, the same? At least 1 satoshi right?

The minimum number of sats you can send in a standard transaction is 546, and the minimum fee you can set is 1 sat/vbyte, which would be somewhere around 140 sats for the smallest "standard" transaction (although the smallest ever transaction broadcast was 62 vbytes). You could pay less of a relative fee if you batched payments together in to one larger transaction, though.

This doesn't apply to using Lightning, where you can send amounts and pay fees denominated in millisatoshis (0.001 of a satsoshi).

doesn't this give bitcoin a hard cap on maximum possible price?

No, for two reasons. Firstly, Lightning already uses sub-satoshi values, and secondly if we did reach a point where a single satoshi was worth $20 as you suggest, then I expect the community would back a hard fork to add more zeroes after the decimal point.

 

[Izaiah]

And so? does it MATTER? lol

futile comparison given between gold and bitcoin, I wished you could gave us some relevance and uniqueness coz we already discussing these two for a while. For the count, bitcoin doesn't have an ATOM, the space that it got is its size, a data size which is not an atom. What you discussed is gold's number of atom vs bitcoin's total denomination.