Would you agree though that when we reach finite, or perhaps even as we approach close to finite, that Bitcoin will tend to gravitate to a small few or am I not looking at it correctly?
I understand that with some of these machines you can't actually get cash, you can only use them to buy bitcoin.
I'm not sure what mechanism would cause bitcoin to gravitate to the small few you are referring to. I mean, there's always going to be someone in the network who holds the most. I'm not going to debate that at all because that's just life. But since the transactions are essentially peer-to-peer, there's no central middle man sitting around taking a cut and accumulating vast amounts of bitcoin along the way.
I mean that just like the US Dollar, people using it tend to buy things from another party and the party that has the most desirable items/products ends up getting a lot of money from a large group of people. If the US stopped increasing the money supply permanently, you would have deflation due to less dollars chasing goods, in fact some folks would have no dollars to chase goods. The entities that have amassed large sums of money would not be using all that money to purchase items and the velocity of money would decline in a great way. Wouldn't that happen as well to Bitcoin when it reaches a finite amount?
Even if all the machines facilitated nothing but buying Bitcoin, that would only be a positive for the price of Bitcoin moving forward.
Bitcoin is not a competitor to the U.S. dollar in terms of it being a medium of exchange, so you can't really compare the two in that way. That's why the IRS has already ruled Bitcoin as property, not as a currency. I think this point is where a lot of people get confused. Bitcoin is not replacing the dollar, so don't view it like that. Bitcoin is best viewed as your internet savings account. It's where you sweep your unused cash in order to protect that cash from the deteriorating effects of fiat money printing and the resulting currency debasement that inevitably happens. When you do that, you keep that cash stored securely out of the hands of the banks that could confiscate your money at any time in a financial crisis, and you prevent that money from essentially going to zero, which at a real inflation rate of 14%, would happen in only 7 years if that money was in a savings account. And not only would you be protecting that money from inflation, you would be benefitting from the deflationary nature of your savings account. As an example, imagine if you put your $50k in savings into your bitcoin savings account 7 years ago. I'll let you look up what Bitcoin's price was back in 2014 and figure out what that $50k would be worth today. And don't listen to these naysayers who's time frame of looking at all this is three friggin' months. I mean you can, but it would be to your detriment in 7 years from now.
It's set by the Bitcoin protocol built-in to the software It's not set in $ or any fiat, but set in satoshi/byte, the amont of storage your transaction will take on the blockchain, i.e. multiple input/output addresses vs single input/output address vs advanced features i.e. multisig It's based on supply and demand for being confirmed on the next block or 2, the number of transactions on the mempool (waiting to be confirmed) = how busy the Bitcoin network is TL;DR, I have not paid more than 20 cents in the last 10 bitcoin transactions I've made
The block reward 6.25 btc plus all the transaction fees belong to the Bitcoin miner that solved block https://www.blockchain.com/btc/bloc...47e0ac5555f5bf2ab0cb6ab441dd76da923bad2288aed