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Comment by throwawayReply | Hacker News Reader

"It's different this time!" - Someone in every bubble.

Can we just stop for a moment and look at what people are actually trading here? A decentralised protocol upheld by a cryptographic function. This can't be compared with any stocks or commodity. Maybe the crash will be the same but it is still different.

stocks and commodity holdings are just protocols too though - not technical ones but legal/contractual ones. It's still pretty crazy though given bitcoin doesn't even have a major (legal) use to anchor it.

But it can be compared with other decentralised protocols upheld by cryptographic functions, so it’s a commodity of sorts.

The Crypto Kitty bubble already popped. I lost a paycheck, which sucks right before Christmas.

Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.

According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.

We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.

Theoretically: Let's just agree with all bitcoin holders for a few moment to not to sell bitcoins to anyone but me. Then, I buy one satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) for one dollar. Just like that, the bitcoin market price is now 100 million dollars. With exactly one dollar "transferred" to bitcoin.

$500,000: BTC market cap approximately equal to value of all mined gold.

I see that number all the time as well, but i'm confused.

There is less than 2 Trillion in Gold in the entire world. If you divide 2 Trillion / 21 Million (total number of possible bitcoins), you would get BTC of $100,000 equals the market cap of Gold. Not $500,000.

By my math BTC of $500,000 would be 5x the market cap of gold. Would someone explain how my math is wrong?

There's really no actual reason it should have value equal to the value of all mined gold though.

There’s no actual reason that gold should have the value it does, either, other than the global shared delusion of it as a store of value.

yes, bitcoin is better then gold, will probably get higher

Except, the millions of gold holders (including in jewelry, etc) around the world can transact among each other at any time.

Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.

> With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.

Thanks for reassuring me that a bitcoin wont ever be worth anything within an order of magnitude to $38,000.

It’s currently worth $16k, so no idea where your skepticism that it’ll reach $3800 is coming from :)

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