It's well known that in a Hilbert space, good inequalities exist concerning the norm due to the existence of inner product.Now let X be a general Banach algebra, are there good inequalities concerning the norm? To be precise, let's consider an example, let X be a commutative Banach algebra with identity I,is the following claim ture or not(especially when X is infinite dimension)? Either for every element b in X with norm 1, we have the norm of b^2 is also 1, or inf ||b^2||=0, with b running over all elements in X with norm 1.
P.S.This problem is derived from a question concerning the existence of a nilpotent element in X, in other words, the linear span of all the multiplicative linear functionals may not equal to the dual space of X.