>Also, when I ran the numbers some time ago, I figured a realistic max value for 1 BTC would be 500k-1M
In what units? What makes you think there won't be Argentina-style inflation of the USD?
In what units? What makes you think there won't be Argentina-style inflation of the USD?
1) A very high (BTC/USD) rate will come from HUGE whales hoarding BTC. Like governments creating crypto reserves, and purchasing BTC in the magnitude of tens of thousands to low million (US have talked about purchasing a million).
2) BTC will never be a currency that is used for huge worldwide transactions, for things commodities like oil, gas, etc. No serious country will give up control of their currency like that, especially not US that will literally go to war if things aren’t purchased in the Uas dollar
3) Likewise, countries will not adapt BTC as their currency, if they cannot control the supply 100%
4) If BTC becomes too competitive, it will be fairly easy to regulate it into being too unattractive.
Those are my macro views.
I think it will continue to be some asset that competes against silver, gold, etc.
Will it though? There are millions of US voters who hold crypto and both sides attempted to appeal to this voting block in the last election (obviously one with more success than the other). Heavily regulating crypto seems to offer massive political downsides with very little potential gain.
And we haven't even seen the crypto version of the NRA yet.
USD losing the world's reserve currency status and:
1. Yuan becomes the reserve currency
2. BTC becomes the reserve currency
they would understand that choice 2 is preferrable for the West
There is a reason the US and other governments went off of the gold standard, and that is so we could control the price of our currency, which is what led to te mess we are in now.
If BTC were controlled by the government it would be no different than the dollar when we were on the gold standard, and that it why it will never be a currency.
Who trusts China enough to sign on board with them to do this?
> 2. BTC becomes the reserve currency
Given what we know of history, why would anyone go towards a new (digital) gold standard? It's a bad system:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775143.Golden_Fetters
that limits monetary and fiscal flexibility and helped usher in and prolong the Great Depression.
just wanted to note that they are using a 20-year history window as an argument, while the gold standard existed for about 3500 years before that, across very different cultures.
The troubles with a fixed monetary supply existed much earlier than that, having historically recorded issues going back almost five hundred years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
We call the thing in the 1930s the "Great Depression", but before it occurred there was another time period that held that label, which has since been renamed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
It's just most folks accepted that this is how things were "supposed" to be because they didn't know any better, but there was great dissatisfaction on how things were:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
It took until the likes of Irving Fischer, Keynes, and FDR until the old habits could be thrown off (too late in some places, like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan):
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945314-the-money-maker...
> […] while the gold standard existed for about 3500 years before that, across very different cultures.
It did not. For most people, most of the time, it was credit that was used in day-to-day life:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
And even the rich often forsook coins:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiable_instrument#History
* https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/30672/1/12%20Chapter%201839%20...
They earliest records of monetary transactions used credit:
* https://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/jesho_UR_14.pdf
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Dynasty_of_Ur
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36854772-the-open-sea
Where gold was perhaps around, most folks were too poor to deal with it. And in a lot of cultures gold was not used at all:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358103-money
The use of gold was mostly concentrated around the Mediterranean.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold
The Chinese used silver (as the Spanish learned post-1492). The Incas had gold (as the Spanish happily learned) but not for currency (of which they had none) but for ornament/jewelry. Other cultures simply used other things, like non-shiny rocks:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
It is actually the gold standard—the convertibility between paper money and shiny rocks—that is the historic anomaly, existing between (depending on how you count things) between one and two hundred years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
Even the very meaning and nature of what is meant by "money" has changed over the millennia, starting with Aristotle and continuing to the present day:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58933308-the-currency-of...
OTOH, government crackdowns might be able to tank the price.
Bitcoin is no more an inflation hedge than gold is, which it is not:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789
and both are something worse, deflationary:
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775143.Golden_Fetters
Gold did not help in stabilizing currencies or economies:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
and neither would Bitcoin.