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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

A million a coin would be over 20 Trillion of market by that time. How would that make sense? It would if many large governments abandoned their own currency system and used bitcoins.

Compare that to golds 1.9trillion practical market size. To match that Bitcoin would be 100k$. Which seem to be a stretch in 5 years by many imaginations, one that requires US to pretty much hyper inflate.

A more realistic upper price could be 50k$ in 5 years based on regulatory risk, volatility and realistic cap, half of all of golds theoretical cap.

The down side is a side way risk where Bitcoin will stay around this 20k-30k mark, may as well invest that in equities or ETFs.

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It makes sense because very few investors actually sell their Bitcoin. The market might be worth 20T but that does not mean 20T of value actually was exchanged.

At risk of sounding a bit tinfoil, this is the same system of a weird pyramid scheme rich people are doing with art, wine, relics, real estate, etc. As long as everyone does not sell at the same time, and supply is (artificially) constrained, there is a huge amount of wealth locked up, no longer participating.

If you want to compare BTC to hold, you need to compare how much of the gold market is actually being traded, vs how much of the crypto market.

I bet there's actually a factor 10 difference there, if not more.

That ratio of total gold yo gold that is trading (or mined each year) is called the “stock to flow”.

It’s quite a fascinating metric.

For instance, it dhows that silver is a commodity rather than a precious metal.

Bitcoins stock to flow now exceeds golds.

What does the amount of gold that is traded have to do with the amount that is mined? For both BTC and gold the mining rate is so small it is basically irrelevant.

> same system of a weird pyramid scheme rich people are doing with art, wine, relics, real estate

All of those are non-fungible; that's why rich people like those.

Bitcoin is pretty damn fungible.

I'm pretty sure those items are fungible from a collectors point of view. Sure if you look at one painting, you can't compare or replace a picasso with a rembrandt. But if you look at only the value of two collections of hundreds of paintings, they might very well be replaced with each other.

Maybe so, but that isn't why rich people like them either.

Non-fungible assets are far more useful for tax evasion. Watch _Tenet_.

Ah alright thanks I hadn't considered that angle.

> At the risk of sounding a big tinfoil...

What you describe is how assets acquire monetary value: people start buying them not because they want them but because other people will want them. Then they don’t sell them because they know other people will want them in the future. Thus they develop a “monetary premium” from that additional demand, and become “stores of value” from the general market behavior.

The theory inside Bitcoin circles is that rich people have been buying up art, unproductive real estate, etc., not because they are good money but because they do not have access to good money, i.e. long-term deflationary, fungible, divisible, portable stores of value, because of our current regime of inflationary fiat money.

In seeking to preserve their wealth, they acquire collectibles, which then become monetary due to scarcity and expectation of future demand. It may be the very same impulse and process that led to the emergence of money in the first place, in the form of shells. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

If Bitcoin demonstrates itself to be “better money,” it should absorb some of the monetary premium of these other goods, as people will have less need to allocate their resources into paintings no one will see and houses no one will live in.

> Then they don’t sell them because they know other people will want them in the future.

This artificially inflating demand for the item, with a very long delay or even obfuscated feedback.

I agree that the value store is a (the only) viable use case for BTC. Although commodities in general check the same boxes without the awkwardness of Bitcoin.

BTW when you say "better money" you mean for this specific use case right? Obviously BTC and cryptocurrency in general are not as good as regular money in general.

> commodities in general check the same boxes without the awkwardness of Bitcoin

To name a few properties, commodities can not be transferred anywhere in the world quickly and at low cost in a censor-less fashion, can not be transported in an immaterial form (e.g. a "brain wallet").

> when you say "better money" you mean for this specific use case right?

I mean better at exhibiting the properties of money (originally articulated by Aristotle): durability, divisibility, portability, etc.

Fiat fails at durability, through ongoing inflation. Art fails at: divisibility, etc.

https://hangthebankers.com/aristotle-and-the-definition-of-m...

https://omniequivalence.com/monetary-properties/

https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/money/top-8-qualities-of...

>It would if many large governments abandoned their own currency

According to Google, there were ~ 2825 billionaires in the world in 2019.

That's 2.825 T right there, and we're talking:

    - Billionaires the world actually knows about
    - Not counting folks who have 10's or 100's of billions
    - Private individuals as opposed to large retirement funds

There's also the oft-and-widely forgotten fact that market cap is wildly different from actual invested funds: jut because two dudes somewhere decide to swap one AMZN share for 30K USD doesn't mean Bezos is suddenly 10x richer.

All in all, while I believe 1M BTCUSD to be unrealistic, if a sizable fraction of that stashed money moves to BTC because they're looking for, e.g, an inflation hedge, there's easily another 10x to be had.

My opinion, not investment advice, goes without saying.

So if literally every known billionaire in the world decided to convert $1 billion of their assets to BTC in the next five years, which in many cases would be most of their assets including control of the businesses that actually made them billionaires, then BTC would be a bit over a tenth of the way towards Raoul Pal's prediction. I'm not sure that makes it sound more realistic.

Market cap doesn't equal actually invested funds, but two dudes swapping one AMZN share for 30k USD doesn't actually make AMZNs market cap when other trades are happening at normal prices either. BTC's current market price is obviously more subject to manipulation than AMZN, but its price isn't dictated by two dudes swapping one BTC at an absurd multiple of what everyone else is willing to sell for either.

>So if literally every known billionaire in the world decided to convert $1 billion of their assets to BTC

Not what I said.

The reason I mentioned the number of billionaires in the world was to point out the magnitude of money sloshing around in the existing financial system and that it would take much less than nation states giving up on their currency for BTC to do (yet another) 10x.

>its price isn't dictated by two dudes swapping one BTC at an absurd multiple of what everyone else is willing to sell for either.

I guess making a point by pushing it to the limit isn't something that is going to work here, so let me rephrase: the fact that Bezos's net worth is calculated by multiplying the number of AMZN shares he owns by the current price of the share is a completely unrealistic way of doing things.

Were he to actually convert all of his AMZN shares to cold hard cash, he would be left with a small fraction of what he currently weighs.

In the same fashion, the BTC market very much sensitive to liquidity: a very large portion of coins were acquired when the price was much lower, and the actual market depth of BTCUSD is - I suspect - rather shallow and it certainly wouldn't take "every known billionaire ..." to move it up 10x.

That math doesn’t add up. There are only ever going to be 21 million bitcoin, 19 million are in private hands, and the remaining 2 million will be mined over the next 120 years.

A billionaire is worth 1,000 million dollars. If there are 2,895 of them, that’s equal to 2,985,000 millionaires.

But with only 21 million bitcoin, that’s 137,000 millionaires— per bitcoin. And that number gets much higher if you divide by the available supply not the total supply.

There’s never going to be enough bitcoin for the millionaires to own even one, if they all wanted to.

That's an interesting way to math it. Your calculation of the number of millionaires is high because some billionaires own hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to google there are approximately 46.8 million millionaires in the world. There will only be 21 million bitcoin.

Less than half of current millionaires could possibly own a whole one.

Plus, 4 million BTC (nearly 20% of total supply) are already thought to be lost forever.

There's definitely not a whole lot of them for something serving as the root of a worldwide movement / new financial system

> There's definitely not a whole lot of them for something serving as the root of a worldwide movement / new financial system

"A mile is so big that the entire planet is only 25,000 of them around. That's definitely not a whole lot of them for something as big as the entire planet."

I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

The point I was trying to make was, if there are 21 million of them, and it really becomes mainstream, having even just one of them will probably be very valuable, more so than now.

2,985,000 millionaires divided by 21 million bitcoins is 0.14 millionaires per bitcoin.

The number has to be less than 1 because 2,985,000 < 21 million. (It looks like you neglected the million when dividing. I'm also not sure how you got 137,000 instead of 142,000.)

We are getting to negative interest rates. A USD Hyperinflation event is absolutely possible.

Bitcoin will hit $100k next year. I expect it will top out around $400k-$500k before falling down to ~$65k in 2022.... only to start running again and easily exceed $1M per coin in 2025.

This may seem absurd to make such predictions,but it isn't a guess like yours are, it’s based on modeling bitcoins fundamentals. You guess is informed by, presumably, the stock market. That’s reasonable if you think if bitcoin like a stock. But it isn't.

Bitcoin is a new form of money, —the hardest money ever— that is going through the technology adoption lifecycle.

Most people really don’t understand bitcoin, yet adoption grows in fits and spurts, and that’s why we get these huge bubbles in the bull markets and huge pullbacks in the bear market.

But in 2026 if I’m right will you still be predicting inly %10 annual growth in bitcoin price? Will you have remembered this comment?

> Bitcoin will hit $100k next year

John McAfee would like to have a word with you...

Actually he's having trouble speaking right now because his mouth is full.

Fake news. Anyway, at dome future point people will search HN for bitcoin price predictions.

I have a million dollars on this one.

Mock me now, and next year you will have forgotten this conversation ever happened.

And thus you will not learn from it.

will you eat your own dick on camera if this prediction doesn't pan out? lmao

Typical HN, my salient points are downvoted to hell but this comment is not.

That’s why this site is one actual hackers avoid.

You are making an outlandish prediction that has been made before. I am simply pointing that out. If you make ridiculous predictions like this someone is going to get hurt.

also FWIW I am currently holding several hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin and a few hundred ethereum. I am as bullish as they come. Price predictions like this are just used to dupe retail and create bag holders after the bubble pops.

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