The bitcoin market is worthwhile $6.3B at the current time so its value is not that negligible and might have an economical impact.
NB: I'm saying that "it may have" not that "it has".
NB: I'm saying that "it may have" not that "it has".
It might just qualify as part of the S&P 500, but that's not really a major hurdle.
PS: If bitcoin wants to be a stable currency it may be well served by invalidating any wallet without transactions for a long enough period of time aka 10 years. Otherwise, in the long term there is going to be a lot of possibly 'dead' coins which makes reasoning about the market difficult.
And why should we work to make the Bitcoin market easier to analyze? Our first priority should be to have a strong long-term (well over 10 years) store of value.
It might be a wording mistake rather than a lack of understanding, but I see your point. If you think about it though, it's technically easy to do and maybe a good thing too. Since you can see any transaction ever done, you can easily lookup the last transaction done by any address with value (valueless addresses can be discarded from memory anyway). If that transaction is more than, let's say, 50 years ago, you could say that it can be discarded from memory too (no longer included in the block chain to preserve space).
People may want to store coins for over 10 years in cold storage (hot storage would simply be able to do a transaction to itself every few years) so maybe that's too short, but 50 years seems like a reasonable time. Looking at the future of Bitcoin (and I mean 100+ years), even though storage will get cheaper and cheaper, it might be smart to discard really old addresses.
Of course this is all just an idea, I'm not saying it really surely would be a great thing to do. It's just that it's possible and not just a dumb remark from Retric.
Why is it difficult?
No one "invalidates" US paper currency that hasn't traded for 10 years. A certain amount of US currency has been burned up in fires or lost to washing machines, yet no one seems concerned. Instead, they use surveys and other forms of statistical analysis to determine the amount in circulation, rather than relying on the US Mint's records of what was ever printed. The same would work for Bitcoin.
Look at the ~10 companies on the NASDAQ between ~6bn and ~6.5bn -- I've only ever even heard of one (Flextronics), much less seen NYT articles about them. (Use Google stock screener, I can't seem to generate a link to the screen.)