The coins are pure digital bits of information so either method of destroying the 'coin' or dividing the 'coin' among the entire economy is the same. Nothing more than numbers on a ledger system.
If the 'coins' were made of metal, paper, food, etc, than the "only to an economist" thought experiment would apply, as "only an economist" would think of value existing in confined economic constraints.
I own two bitcoins. If I destroy them, your bitcoins will not instantly appreciate because my bitcoins were not actively marketed. You only affect price if you decrease supply but my bitcoins are not part of the supply since I don't have them for sale and I'm not buying anything with them.
If I destroy them, your bitcoins will not instantly
appreciate because my bitcoins were not actively marketed.
- Not instantly no, but if you were to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you possessed 10 million BTC, and somehow also were able to prove that you destroyed those 10 million coins, the reaction from the economy would assume the current coins in circulation have just become more valuable purely due to the perception of "scarcity". I would personally contest that perception as BTC is sparsely more than a record keeping system, and the value of a BTC should not matter if there were 40 million coins in the network, or 10 coins that could be divided infinitely.
A major premise of the 'Bitcoin economy' involves the stipulation that the 'BTC economy' is hard limited to "21,000,000" coins and dividable only down to .00000001
These rules are part of what has attracted people to apply real world value to an otherwise simple piece of accounting software. If someone proved they destroyed 20 million bitcoins somehow, or if there were a hard fork consensus among all major miners to nullify the last 10 million coins from being minable, thus limiting the BTC network to 11,000,000 full coins (1,100,000,000,000,000.0 total accountable units), than the perception of value relative to Euros or Dollars would, in what I would compare to the perceived value of limited edition toys like Beanie Babies, Magic the Gathering Cards, or Happy Meal toys. Only instead of a mass produced toy, it is a digital point system where people have used computer hardware to 'mine' BTC points.
If the Genesis coins started moving, one might assume the price of BTC to fluctuate as a result of peoples perception on the 'supply' of this digital currency.
If another cryptocoin is created with a design that agreeably surpasses that of the BTC protocol, than one might assume a migration of users from BTC to the presumably better protocol.
> If the Genesis coins started moving, one might assume the price of BTC to fluctuate as a result of peoples perception on the 'supply' of this digital currency.
Though, the Genesis coins moving might also increase the price. Satoshi moving their coins would be a very monumental event---it's hard to predict how people would interpret in aggregate.
If the 'coins' were made of metal, paper, food, etc, than the "only to an economist" thought experiment would apply, as "only an economist" would think of value existing in confined economic constraints.