Quote from: greaterfool on July 08, 2014, 05:15:02 AM

Quote from: ShakyhandsBTCer on July 06, 2014, 01:41:36 AM

Quote from: BitChick on July 05, 2014, 07:09:18 PM

Quote from: Sindelar1938 on July 05, 2014, 06:22:50 PM

I think 50 to 100k is possible in the far away future if a lot of things come together
1m is just a ridiculous number, far too abstract almost

Just because it seems "ridiculous" does not mean it isn't possible. Wink

Many people thought $1000 a coin was a ridiculous price and it would never get there.

Why don't you look at it this way.

Once all the BTC is mined there will be 21,000,000 BTC in circulation.

If one BTC is worth $1 then the market cap of bitcoin would be $21 million

If one BTC is worth $100 then the market cap of bitcoin would be $2.1 Billion

If one BTC is worth $1,000 then the market cap of bitcoin would be $210 Billion

If one BTC is worth $100,000 then the market cap of bitcoin would be $21 trillion

If one BTC is worth $1,000,000 then the market cap of bitcoin would be $210 Trillion.

As of 2012 the GDP of the US was ~15 trillion dollars and the GDP of the world was ~46 Trillion

Does it still seem plausible for bitcoin to reach $1,000,000?

Here's an idea, bear with me:

This wikipedia article claims that the world GDP is ~85 trillion as of 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Assuming that number is accurate - what if there's only 2.1 million coins available instead of 21 million? E.g. because most people will hold for very long periods of time, it's entirely possible that most of the value is concentrated in the number of coins being used for economic activity. Let's say only 10% of coins are "in play". Divide those 2.1 million by 1 billion people (smartphone users would be a good example) that have a need to use BTC for economic activity, and you have something like each person on average gets .0128 BTC. If BTC are 1 MM USD, then each person on average is responsible for 12,800 dollars of economic activity in BTC, with a market cap of 12.8 trillion USD. (Compared to the previous numbers 2.1 million coins available reduces this by a factor of 10x and the updated GDP halves it - with your numbers it's more like each person needs to
be responsible for 250K of economic activity in BTC).

This implies that the long term holders of bitcoin - people in the top 1% of ownership - will have a heavy incentive to cash out REALLY slowly (slow enough to maintain a nash equilibrium between new USDs going into BTC and their BTC cashing out to USD) - but they may not be able to coordinate well enough to maintain an equilibrium, causing a crash as the market gets flooded with BTC the first time someone cashes out hard and supply increases.

I think BTC can easily hit 1 million USD assuming it becomes 'the paypal of smartphones', and as long as finance + tech sector maintains interest in it - a broad base of users who small amounts of value, and a large group of whales in semi-collusion or at least who recognize their own self interest and won't crash the system for a while. The question is, can it stay at 1 MM USD for even more than a single femtosecond, and who's going to be making money off of the short trades and the exchange vig? Wink

The difference between

IIRC the market cap @ $1000 was about $10 billion