Quote from: Hyena on February 20, 2016, 01:46:05 PM

We have seen the surge in the gold's market cap lately. This is just the beginning, the first cracks in the current financial paradigm. The problem with gold is that it is physical and thus poses a psychological problem to mainstream investors when it becomes scarce due to extreme demand. The investors will see that they could physically only acquire a miserable and pathetic looking amount of gold (as it has become "too expensive") so they will run into silver. But silver too, has the same intrinsic problem.

So far, bitcoin's deception has lied in the fact that we are presented the idea that one bitcoin is divisible up to 8 decimal places which gives the false image of a bitcoin being a floating point number. In reality block rewards are represented by unsigned integers. Thus instead of 1 bitcoin one has 100 000 000 satoshis. To break the psychological barrier of 1 bitcoin costing too much we should just switch to satoshis. The latter will be plausible when BTC rises in value.

The market cap of gold is $7,252,708,420,909.
The market cap of bitcoin is $ 6,549,170,380 (0.082% of gold's).

I can say that gold is already psychologically too expensive for an average Joe on the street. Imagine when it grows 5x as it has done previously during financial collapses. Owning a gram of gold doesn't make you feel good about it, it feels sad as it is just a tiny speck. So, naturally, other stores of value will gain popularity. If bitcoin was only 1% of gold's market cap, it would already cost more than 5000$ per BTC. If 1 bitcoin costed 5k, then 1 satoshi would be 0.00005$. The world's least valuable currency Iranian Rial trades at 0.00004$ . So after 5k $ bitcoins it would be nothing new to this world to have satoshis for the main units to represent the value of your bitcoins. The world has already seen such a situation in Iran.

Daily recommended minimum amount of money for food per person is 10.72 $. With 5000$ BTC, a daily meal would then cost 214400 satoshis. Let's be honest, 200 000 is not that big of a number any more to be uncomfortable to use in daily basis. This is also the reason why poor countries could adopt bitcoin more easily. They are already used to making transactions of such order of magnitude in their currency units.

That sounds to me a lot like gold bug mantra. I have heard it a lot since the crash from the ATH in gold. That is in the last FIVE years gold was gonna go someday to five digit territory and even beyond. Never happened. Quite to the contrary gold was put under huge selling pressure instantiated by the big banks (also called The Cartel by the gold bugs) every time there was an important support line, to induce even more damage. And so gold went from $19xx to $10xx handle, that is nearly 50% discount. Bitcoin is of course younger and more volatile, but $5k is a pure sci-fi and I suppose this thread should be moved to such a section.