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mining bitcoins cheaper than minting: :::::::
There are now 8.3 trillion US dollars in the world (both physical and virtual), so if Bitcoin were to take control of all that, its (equivalent, since in such a world USD would likely no longer exist) price would be $8.3 trillion / 21 million, or $3.95 million USD per BTC. Assuming that transaction fees stay the same (a fair assumption, since total fees as measured in real value and the real-value price of a bitcoin both roughly scale with the size of the community so the two cancel out), the network will cost at most the real value of the transaction fees (1.44 BTC per day) — $2.08 billion per year. Just the US Mint spends $7 billion per year right now, not to mention the private businesses that will be supplanted by Bitcoin — Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, much of the banking system, etc. Even with transaction fees 50 times as high, Bitcoin will be worth it.
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