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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.)

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