You have to look at market cap, not individual price. Why would all the BTC that’s around be suddenly 10x the value it was a year ago? What would drive that?
I thought that was implied, but yes you're right.
Let's imagine we're in the future and bitcoin made up 5% of global wealth. In that case, do you think it would be easier for bitcoin to go up 10x than it was back in the early 2010s?
So if some idiot says that stonk X is hot at 1$, the amount of money that is available to buy that stonk and pump it’s price up is much higher than for a stonk that’s at 1000$ and that only 1% of the population can put money in.
Lots of places offer the ability to buy partial stocks. Also, BTC and company all allow partial coins. Lastly, idiot retail buyers who can only afford a few bucks of anything won’t move the market.
Because currencies can collapse in value, and some of them will. I lived in Russia in the 90s. The hyperinflation was so bad they had to revise price stickers in the stores upwards _twice a day_ at one point. Some stores even switched to electronic price displays back then to make this easier to do. This also drives up the prices more because merchants have to factor in the hyperinflation with the latency of replenishing the stock, meaning that by the time they need to buy more stuff, that stuff could easily cost twice as much, so they'd increase prices further to account for that future cost, and their supplier would, of course, do the same, and so on and so forth, further driving the inflationary spiral.
That wasn't because stuff was getting more valuable, that was because the ruble was collapsing through the floor. Those who had money either spent it on something right away, or converted it to dollars and exchanged only as much as they would need in the very near future. Except this time you don't get to do that because _dollar itself_ could collapse. A lot of the economy turned to barter deals by the way, where one type of goods was exchanged with another, often as a part of a multi-way deal, with little to no actual monetary component.
That's not to say that BTC won't collapse along with the currencies though. It's just that you can't print more BTC on a whim.
Armed with that experience, though, if you have a reasonably stable job, the best thing you can do right now is borrow a shit ton of money at historically low interest rates. If inflation hits (which it looks like it will), you will be able to pay back pennies on the dollar. All of the Russian oligarchs have gotten rich through a combination of hyperinflation and corruption.
I’m not sure this line of reasoning applies to altcoins whose maximum quantity can be set by the creator.
In particular, the huge bull run in crypto happened because mass retail and institutional money came into the market, bidding the price up. Arguably, if TSA agents are already bought into bitcoin (the implication being that TSA agents, as a class of people, are very unsophisticated investors) there isn't a lot more money waiting on the sidelines that could flood the market (not completely true, as there are still untapped pools of institutional money).