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Comment by ritinkar | Hacker News Reader

If BTC cracks 1 million won't that mean there's 2.1 trillion dollars worth of USD BTC in circulation in addition to all the other currencies?

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Only in the most theoretical sense. Since there is no underlying asset, you are going to run out of buyers real fast at that amount.

If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying.

Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.

There's a VR webapp that was shared recently that shows live btc transactions. Just thought i'd share that for the 10 minutes I watched it the other day I saw numerous 10M+ transactions

Those are transfers, not necessarily transactions. No one probably traded 10m in bitcoin for USD. If an exchange transfers btc from one wallet to another for holding, it will show up on the transactions list.

To support your argument, according to this[0] the largest recent transaction about 3 hours ago was almost 25 million USD. 5 other transactions also exceeded 1 million USD in the last hour or so.

[0]: https://blockchain.info/largest-recent-transactions

I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that almost all of those large transactions are inter or intra exchange movements simply moving money around into different wallets. Also, they only indicate a transfer, it seems very unlikely that anyone has cashed out $25m all at once with bitcoin.

You can't really know that except for a few publicized ones. Those "transactions" you see are simply transfers. They "could" be a transfer to someone in exchange for USD. Or, as they are in almost all cases, they are transfers from one wallet to another both owned by the same person or exchanges that are holding large amounts of BTC moving money around internally as well.

You only run out of buyers if there are sellers.

I have 1 BTC but I lost the wallet. So that's one less BTC in circulation. (Literally, it is impossible for that BTC to circulate).

I'm in the same boat. CPU-mined somewhere between 1.5 and 2 BTC back in 2010 or 2011, and lost the wallet years ago. I wonder how much BTC has been lost to similar mistakes, but I guess there's no way to know or even estimate, right?

I managed to loose ~53 BTC too. I'm pretty sure a large percentage of bitcoin is gone forever.

https://www.google.no/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/11/25...

If bitcoin price is derived from the bid ask, most of the worlds money would have to be parked in bitcoin, does that even make sense?

"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.

Now that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.

All it takes is a single trade at a $100M valuation and, for that nanosecond, that's the value of Bitcoin.

Yes but no one really considers that to be the market price.

Yes, the exchanges would, at least until a bunch more lower transactions took place.

Money supplies are constantly inflating, every financial instrument can be looked at as a form of money, and quite a few of them are actually considered to be money, such as treasuries and traveler's cheques. According to Wikipedia, the broadest measure of money supply currently in use was 10.5 trillion, in 2013.

That cryptocurrencies are not currently considered to be money by the world economic order, it goes into a much broader range of financial assets like stocks and bonds. The S&P 500 market size reached 19.6 trillion USD in 2016

Bitcoin has a lot of room to grow before it even comes close to playing in that league. Everybody on HN should be buying crypto right now, the upside is that huge.

Except it isn't parked in any way. The money goes from the hands of the optimistic buyers into the hands of those who decided to cash out just now. The only asset "backing" Bitcoin is the people willing to buy it.

It's weird to complain that because btc is backed by no set, it it not really worth it's process in USD, which is also backed by no asset.

USD is backed by "the full faith and credit of the US government". BTC is backed by the Internet and meme magic.

21 trillions, or about 3 times the value of all gold mined in the world.

And around the market size of the S&P 500.

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