US gold reserves currently worth something like $300Bn, the largest in the world (though it's no clear if anyones checked its there). All this is less than a company like Google but still $70Bn is a lot of money.
I'm sure there is room for the market cap of bitcoin. As you are saying the gold is worth 300B in just USA market then just imagine how it is worth in the whole world. That's a lot of money and if that can come into gold then I'm pretty sure it can come into all new crypto currency like bitcoin.
Again, the "digital gold" theory. For me, it's based on wishful thinking.
A simple example of the fundamental difference between gold and Bitcoin comes into light when trying to answer the question:
Does gold have alt-coins?
You can now say that every other precious metal could be an "alt-coin" for gold. But gold has properties that can't be copied: It's beautiful (and thus used in jewelry), useful in some industrial applications (other metals have other applications), and has a lot of tradition as store of value, (as you already said but my emphasis is in another point). Bitcoin, instead, is
technically much easier to copy and so fundamentally different.
Above all the third property of gold is also pointing in the direction I went with my previous post in this thread:
The most important aspect that dictates long-term prices and market cap is the real use. Gold is so institutionalized as "store of value" that you would need decades or centuries to let holders switch to other assets. (And it's difficult to move, unlike Bitcoin)
Only if Bitcoin achieves an important "network" that really use it, it can come near the properties and the "un-copyability" of gold, and so become a real competitor.
Limits the market cap of bitcoifrom of e For the bitcoin price to rise a lot of money would have to flow in. Right now it seems like every grandma and her dog is being persuaded onto the bitcoin bandwagon. Is this not a sign of an impending crash, in which those at the bottom of the pyramid get burned? Is the bitcoin rise sustainable? Where will the money be flowing in from of the limits market cap of bitcoin.