Bitcoin works at any price. If Bitcoin was $5000/coin, I am not sure the network would handle the resulting transaction volume. (Which is why we are looking at a hard-fork to raise the maximum block size.)
PoW solves the initial coin distribution problem. In PoS, banks with unlimited money can easily take over the currency. With PoW, banks can not simply inflate the price in order to buy up all the currency. If they do that, miners would scramble to generate new coins with anything they can find.
Gold also works the same at any price, doesn't mean if as a gold holder, I like being charged 10% annual tax perpetually, I would definitely also try to remove that tax if it existed on gold.
In PoS, sure banks with money can buy up the currency (and enriching all the previous stakeholders in the process). I don't see how they can't do that with PoW system, they could do it much cheaper and easier, by buying up existing miners. I don't really see your argument here.
During the gold rush, the supply of gold was probably increasing 10% per year. (I don't have hard figures readily available.)
For the bank thing, I was making a reference to the
[prediction] Next spike $560,000 14 months from now thread in speculation -- that prediction assumes a final Bitcoin price of $300,000.
Governments have noticed it, powerful people have noticed it, *banks* have noticed it. Right now we are in a perfect storm of the aftermath of a huge overshoot on the purchase of mining equipment - this is *fact* as evidence by the hash rate/difficulty.
This will take time to unravel. It surely will though, as irrational as people are, they will eventually stop flushing money down the mining drain. That money will turn towards the supply. As it becomes obvious the bottom is in, that is when people will start the next run up. Only this time it isn't going to be just neckbeards, redditors, hipsters and anonymous, it will be institutions. That have pretty much unlimited buying power by virtue of them essentially being able to print their own money, because they are TBTF and will just keep bankrolling each other whilst nuzzling the teat of QE washing away their toxic assets.
So the move will be unprecedented.
Unprecedented to you and I and all the other peons around here. To those behind the move, they just spent a few hundred millions to acquire assets they can now assign book values of billions. Selling into this only makes you weaker in the end game, and selling is what they want you to do because those dollars you are acquiring get more worthless the more bitcoin they have. Who here though has the constitution to hold as they see the price double repeatedly. We are still at the end of the day all hardwired for fiat. As much as anyone pretends they are not.
So the number I have picked is probably not that accurate. The magnitude, and the colossal unbeleivableness of it, is what is important. That's the black swan that nobody sees coming. That 90% of the people in the world will miss 90% of the bitcoin.
(Bold mine)