Bitcoin Forum

So I made some calculations today.
The total world's wealth is estimated around $241,000,000,000,000 (source (http://wealthmaverick.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world/)), the total value of all the gold in the world is $7,290,669,617,313 (source (http://onlygold.com/Info/All-The-Gold-In-The-World.asp)) and bitcoin's market cap as of now is $6,382,047,520 (source (http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/)).

This basically means that gold represents 3% of the total world's wealth and that bitcoin is only worth 0.0026% of it. In other words, by comparing bitcoin directly to gold: the total value of all bitcoins is 0.087% (or 1/1142) of the total value of all the gold that there is. Looking at it from this point of view bitcoin can easily get to 4 digits. It then seems pretty down-to-earth to say that we will definitely get there before 2020 if nothing goes wrong. 6 digits though, would put us very close (or even above) gold's value, which is hard to imagine at the moment. The millions have already been made but there is still a lot of money to be made with bitcoin and we now have something that pioneers didn't have: stability. Stability is a great thing because it allows for a reliable store of value. I thinks we've actually reached a pretty good balance between prospects and safety of investment.
In other words: we're only waiting for metallurgists to find a way to melt tungsten and gold together. Ok we might have to wait for a while  ;D.

(Also, Ethereum's market cap is already $1,061,551,795, roughly 17% of bitcoin's. Meanwhile everyone is still wondering what the heck it can be good for and no one seems quite sure that the price is high enough as is  ;D.)

For something like this to happen, you need mass adoption of Bitcoin worldwide, 4 years is too short. Gold is acknowledged by everyone to be valuable, it is something tangible that even people in their 80's or older can easily recognize. Bitcoin is a new generation thing and at the moment attracts only people that are technologically savvy. When we've reached a point where the oldest person on earth was born after Bitcoin was created, Bitcoin will have been universally assimilated. Of course we might not need to wait that long  ;)

+1

Bitcoin need at least 10-20 years to come into mainstream. Price should be +$20,000. But we'll see.

Ok, where do I sign up for a tesla and does anyone want to go halvsies on a private jet?

I think less - it can be 5 - 10 years. We already have signals that big companies are interested in Bitcoin (Sony, Burger King). Some big countries already make research to use Bitcoin as a currency. It can be faster than we think ;)

in fact real bitcoin price should be in the range of 10k-100k if not above 100k, but people seems to be stabborn enough to believe that the actual price is high

when there will be the real boom, everyone will see cheap bitcoin even at 50k value, guaranteed...

For the answer as to what ETH is good for, see the following:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ethereum-powered-augur-brings-its-beta-microsoft-azures-blockchain-cloud-1549630

Lots of stuff is going to be built around ETH, and that's where it's value is coming from.

You started out well, with sources and information points,
Then it quickly went downhill when you started speculating on what price Bitcoin should be.  Of course it could be 4 digits, it could be 5 digits.  That is not to say that it will, or that it won't be 2 digits.

I look forward to Bitcoin actually being accepted for stuff, and solving the problems that it should be solving - i.e. fast low cost money transfers.  When that happens the price will rise, if it doesn't and I don't really know why it hasn't, then it won't go anywhere fast.

you are right, I hope bitcoin will reach this price at any time from now. I believe and bitcoin and bitcoin will surely reach that we just need to give support for it.

Thats true the market cap of gold is very very high compared to the bitcoin. With the growth analysis of bitcoin it is clear that from its day of existence, bitcoin has grown enormously.

Yes, the growth is excellent.  Also, consider that gold has been around for eons and bitcoin is not to far behind on market cap.  If it continues to grow as OP has calculated then this is going to get good!  ;D

You can't really make wedding rings out of bitcoin, so it has some limitations gold does not have...

It makes no sense comparing the value of x to the value of y. You can't just exchange them. The value of apples on earth for example is a lot less than the value of bitcoin. And yet, it has nothing to do with it. You can't say "let's replace all apples by bitcoin", just as you can't replace all gold by bitcoin.

I see a serious limitation from the blockchain there... As long as "the ones in power" don't make it possible to do - say - 1000 times more transactions, why should the value go up 50-fold? You can't have mass adoption if the blockchain is already pushed to its limits.

You can't send gold immediately across the planet, so it has some limitations bitcoin does not have.

It makes no sense compare apples with bitcoin but it makes sense compare bitcoin with gold because they both can be used by the same people for same purpose, store of value, if those people move 1% of their gold investment to bitcoin, bitcoin's price will increase a lot.

so how long do we wait this out lol.

I dont mind waiting for another 4 years, but having to wait like someone mentioned 10 years minimum.


I`ll prob invest in ETH if the day I see it on the googles webpages in the rankings to replace the word "bitcoin".

Until then it seems pointless is in my view.

You nailed it. Well you can chop my post in four bits if you want:
1) I'm comparing the total world's wealth with bitcoin and gold's market caps. This is cold, documented, mathematics.
2) I'm speculating on the future price of bitcoin.
3) I'm cracking a joke about bitcoin killing gold because gold will be easy to counterfeit in the future (yes, that was humour  :D)
4) I'm mocking the ridiculousness of the pump that Ethereum saw during these past two months. The future has already proven me right regarding that bit because the present is the future of my OP and Ethereum is coming down already. (To this I should add that I don't think that ethereum is the regular type of shitcoin, because I don't, quite the opposite actually, but yeah, the price last week was out of its boots).

Regarding part 2, which is only about speculation, of course, anything could happen, I'm not saying that bitcoin will have to find a bigger niche than it already has (and which is already pretty respectable). My, it might even lose it and be brought down to two digits. Thing is: I think it is unlikely. Now based on my calculations above, bitcoin's market cap is horribly far away from gold's, while I personally think that although being usable only as a currency and a store of value, bitcoin is just every bit as good as gold. It even does the currency part better than gold does because it's easy to transfer worldwide. Of course yes, that bit is not cold mathematical calculations: it's my prediction based on the mathematical calculations. It's not what the future has to be, only what it might be according to my own opinion. I don't think I properly went downhill when I gave away my opinion though. You should just not expect too much of it: it's only my opinion and I don't have the ability to foresee the future  :D. No need to bring it down any more  :D.

What happened so Ethereum is so highly regarded now? It is easily the 2nd cryptocurrency now. And it is getting bigger as we speak. There are rumors that Microsoft will be accepting ETH in their shop.
And they already give up on accepting Bitcoin few days ago.

Man if I had a time machine like you do I would definitely want to travel to the future like you did. But tell me, why only one week? I'd go for one or two centuries, for a starter, if I was given the occasion.
1) Ethereum is crashing (https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/ethbtc/12h)
2) Microsoft has already denied its statement regarding bitcoin. They accept it again. (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/14/microsoft-stops-accepting-bitcoin-on-windows-10.html)

As for your question regarding what happened to Ethereum, well speculation happened. A snowball effect, no less.

Apple accounts for 0.3% of the world's total wealth? That seems too high.
I guess some of that value has to be transferred to Bitcoin.  ;D

Gold is backed by a long 'history' ... bitcoin not yet.

I think the market cap of gold above the ground is around $7 trillion.
So just 1% of that streaming into Bitcoin would add another $70 billion to its' market cap.

I think that you can't compare world's wealth with Bitcoin's (or gold's) market cap. Many people are comparing Bitcoin with fiat money, so let's assume they are right (though I'm not sharing their opinion). I haven't made any research recently, but I believe that money in circulation around the world are rougly $75 trillion, which gives 10% for the gold.

I realized something else: you are comparing "money" and "wealth", while the two of those aren't directly related.
Suppose bitcoin would go up in value and be worth 100 times more. Market cap would be around 6 trillion dollars. You would say wealth went up, right? But in reality it only moves from one person to the other, as nothing more is produced because of it.
Just like increasing prices of all products does not make us more wealthy, even if our salary increases with it.
Owning more money would make me wealthier, but only if someone else loses money over it. Not if we all get more money.

The weird thing about money is: the more you think about it, the more you realize you don't understand what it is.

Actually, if Bitcoin's price goes up, wealth is created. It is not just because the last person poured in some money. It is because the valuation of all bitcoins has increased in people's eyes.
 
If Bitcoin goes to zero, wealth is destroyed.

Today came the time that will determine the future of cryptocurrencies. All known restrictions on the use of Bitcoin in some countries at the legislative level. At the same time, the United States is very much discussion of the future prospects of cryptocurrency development, give positive feedback when using Bitcoin. The EU authorities said that they plan to tackle trafficking in cryptocurrency and try to regulate it. The main initiator of the future of cryptocurrencies is the German Central Bank, which not only gives recommendations on the use of cryptocurrencies, but also discusses the prospects for further development with other Central banks of Europe.

Based on what can you conclude that it is very easy for bitcoin price to be 4-digits, these long number are far away from the bitcoin total market cap but I think that to have a 4-digit price bitcoin should be developed and adopted gradually time by time from different big merchants.

The 4-digit valuations would be possible if there were simply more people buying and less people selling (as it goes for basically all things to be honest), and because of this, while it is possible, we likely won't see it for still a little while yet. I believe we could see some of these things becoming a reality within the next five years, but I personally hope it doesn't take that long.

The $1000 price could only be reached when the block size to be incrased to more than 1MB or even higher.

That would be a rough estimate of money being in circulation. Of course bitcoin has a small market capitalization compared to gold and fiat. Bitcoin just started, and the overall bitcoin in circulation is just limited on my opinion.Even if bitcoin will increased in value, still its minimal compared to fiat currency. Maybe they should add more bitcoins, but it could lower its value ;)

We will not have to wait that long. Things are developing very fast these days and if Bitcoin will become mainstream like other currencies that will happen much sooner, 5-7 years at most.
Altgough I'm not sure about the price, it seems a bit too excessive. It will go up a lot with time, that I agree. Still, that much....But like you've said we'll see.

I think $20,000 is a reasonable price for Bticoin if it will be fully adopted. Actually the price might go much higher if most people would start trusting Bitcoin more than other currencies, but we can't guarantee that that will happen. But $20k might be reached due to wider adoption alone: people will start buying coins and since we can't make more of them than is made in a certain period of time, the natural response to the higher demand will be the rising of the price.

Economics and the free market, and of course the price is depends from supply and demand. When Bitcoin enters to the mainstream, we can not predict, but we can certainly predict that at the time when all coins will be extracted  (about 21 million), run out the possibility of supply, and demand will grow = price will rise! ..and will rise very very fast! ;)

There are a lot of ifs for that price to be attained. Achieving the trust of people is not easy. People trust gold (and dollars) because it has been around for a long time. Bitcoin was born yesterday,  :)

The new 0.13 Core Client has been released. The SegWit has been implemented. So the price could rise.

Bitcoin is still new for many as most people don't even know what it is, while Gold is being used since ages and will get used till many more ages.
Where Gold which was barter-traded for things before, it is not easy for Bitcoins to take its place that easy.

I did like to know such information, and its amazing how much gold does influence the global economy already, but focus into bitcoin, thats a new coin compared to fiat as well gold, in 7 years bitcoin has a small community and just some people do know and have bitcoin, soo lets give more 7 years to see what bitcoin had becamed against the others, i really believe bitcoin will reach gold value if not cross it.

All that is true, but I'm sure it will all be replaced with bitcoin. Now that more and more people are looking for something that can be sold in a short time at a price that could rise with the fast way anyway. It is not owned by the gold so if we can promote bitcoin well then it would be a great advantage for all of us and the growth of the bitcoin

Yeah speculation about price is pretty pointless to say the least, but I can agree that everything surrounding Bitcoin is going pretty good and fast.
Just the fact that only recently, Steam has adopted Bitcoin is pretty good news and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon would offer Bitcoin support in the next couple of years.

Many people already have a lot of cryptocurrency. Now we announce that crypto currency is like shares of the company "the future of Money", and start to trade them on the exchange for real dollars. Set the market price. She's growing up, because wanting to touch the money of the future a lot, and handed out for free 25 coins every 10 minutes to one, and still have to solve puzzles in General, it is easier to buy.

if this world was already modern from when gold was known or atleast bitcoin and gold known at the same time,then both will have competition,it's actually just a little bit not fair if you're comparing gold to bitcoin if it's about total market cap whilst gold exist from thousands year ago

I like this kind of calculations, and this one shows how much more bitcoin need work to go up. There is a lot of space for bitcoin to make progress, in future with this tempo bitcoin can worth as gold, lets not make any predictions when will that happen, important thing is that is possible to happen one day.
ETH achieved a lot for the time they are here, more then many other coins, their fast grow maybe can continue in next year. Who will say that, I think its good for bitcoin to have a little competition in other alt coins. That is always a good thing, that can make bitcoin even stronger one day.
 

I don't think Op comparing the value of x, y, z that could be replaced each other, it just representative of bitcoin value I thought and could be be better rise in the future.

Talking about bitcoin become mainstream currency and accepted by Gov mostly in every country may take less than 20 years, nearly 10 years later regarding today adoption and the price just reach $700.

With so much money people have and to replace them witj totally bitcoins it would require a lot of time .maybe thr estimated time would be 20 -30 years and by then the price of bitcoins would be 30000 dollars .

i wonder if i can still alive for that years because if we only waiting for that a long time without doing nothing then it will not good for us and we don't make our bitcoin is grow, we only spend our time with nothing and only wait. bitcoin is a long journey for us to follow, we can only make prediction how far bitcoin can online and with almost 8 years from beginning, bitcoin have a good history for many people and now we can see that the price of bitcoin is slow but sure will be up.

It has been 2 months since I speculated about the $1k and seems that it happened faster that we expected, so it's not all about the block size but is about adoption and people's usage and many more.

Scaling debate is all smoke and mirrors here as there are still not enough of bitcoin users or transaction to cover full network capacity.
The problems with stuck BTC transactions and memory pool overflow was caused not by high number of organic transactions but rather by high number of dust/fake transactions aimed to cripple the network.

Bitcoin will worth more then gold one day when it mainstream as you can store more bitcoins then gold as good take time and effort to story buy and sell when bitcoins ate digital so takes less time effect and space.

Bitcoin is much better than gold in many ways, it has a faster rising value which makes it a very good short term investment, the gold on the other hand just rises slowly but it will never go down, and people trust it because they have used it for many years now, unlike bitcoin which is a new thing but hopefully it will become more popular in the future.

Its a terrific calculations you really do your research. Bitcoin could actually hit and can compete with gold if another 10 years will be given to bitcoin but the threat of fiat virtual currency is bugging me now. Its the ultimate threat to bitcoins but if bitcoin overcomes that threat and continue to flourish then there is no stopping for bitcoins to reach a higher stage in the world economy.

This is generally not applicable. The price of gold goes up and down, not as bitcoin's price but if anybody sees the price of gold globally will notice that sometimes descends and is natural in buy/sell markets. In cases of financial instability the price rises, while when there are better prospect for development and more money are invested then it goes down. Always the objective is a trade-off between fiat and gold

I don`t know why do you have to make such calculations?

Gold is a physical accet.To have bitcoins you need electricity,internet connection and a computer.

There`s no need to compare gold vs. bitcoins.

If you're really saying that gold never go down then you must try to learn a lot about this things because your statements is awfully wrong, learn from this statistic http://www.gold.org/statistics
gold also ever go down its price just like bitcoin but not as volatile as bitcoin does

To have gold you need secuity and a gov who will let you, also need transportation if you are going to use it.  I think people compare BTC to anything, its just that gold is the big one to go after since its always been known as the closest thing the real concept of what money is.

It doesn't matter bitcoin is nothing in front of the current assets in world but as i said it doesn't matter because it is surely considered by many the most profitable source and also the easiest. Gold will have more numbers because it is way older than bitcoin. What makes these figures fail is bitcoin has a limited supply meaning in future having 0.002% it will still have more value than the remaining 50%

Being 0.08% of the golds total value on the earth have you seen gold going all above 4500 USD at anytime? I think no, never, that's the uniqueness of the bitcoin and the value it holds. Try recalculating your math in comparison with price of the assets that they are holding currently. And compare with the worlds market capitalisation for each of them. I'm pretty sure you will come up with different results, obviously bitcoin being on the brighter side of the math.  ;D

Bitcoin is far better than gold. And today is the best day to invest more in Bitcoin. The previous comments are correct, sooner we will see bitcoin at the price of $20K or $50kf in the next 10 to 20 years. In fairness nice calculation.

But that is because we have been mining gold for thousands of years, bitcoin in the other hand has only been mined for 9 years, gold is still king even if the price of each bitcoin is bigger than an Oz of gold the market cap of gold stills dwarfs bitcoin, we still have a long way to go if we want to change that.

If as your said, your thought are Bitcoin in future can growth more, even x100 the price at now is possible right? Bitcoin and Gold very difference, both are good asset but the volatility of Bitcoin higher than Gold, it cannot stable like Gold after increased up. :)

no doubt bitcoin is better than gold because it is increasing in price and the price of the gold is still as it was. Bitcoin is using a lot of new things and it has invented many new things which increased the price and the importance of the bitcoin a bit more. Whenever I count my income from bitcoin I become so happy and I am thankful to bitcoin for this help.

Really intresting analysis, of course it's hard to compare gold and bitcoin because a lot of difficulties between this two "currencies" and popularization of metals are higher then cryptocurrency but people will understand more about digital currencies after they would see a implemntation of bitcoin and other currencies to normal stuff as payments, transfers, exchanges, investing  

Just mentioning Bitcoin just have value because we are in a modern world society, without powerful technology Bitcoin loses all its price and Gold rules as it's a physical asset and exists since the beginning of the world, being useful since thousands of years ago and still is now even on the modern world. If the world as we know today colapses, Bitcoin will colapses and the man will return to his origins.

I believe the virtual can't replace the physical forever.

As long as calculations are concerned, I think you have clarified everything as a sum-up. Bitcoins have been rising since 202 and still they are going up and up. So if you compared it even with gold you will see the profit and plus thing in bitcoins. It is now believed that bitcoin will be rocking in coming 5-10 years.

This is right. This can't happen only because of market manipulation. We have to see bitcoin to be used in daily life and business payments. That's why official adoption of bitcoin is vital.

I always assumed that bitcoin is overestimated so far and your numbers confirm this. People speak about bitcoin solve poverty, but your numbers clearly show that this is not the case.

To further speculate, we need to see what governments will do as soon as bitcoin becomes a larger part of the total wealth.

Thats very nice information and all people in the world does know about gold and several does use it as store of value, imagine half of them know bitcoin and 20% invest into bitcoin, i do see bitcoin and crypto getting very near those gold power on the next 20-30 years, all it requires is legalization and merchants to work with crypto and price will follow those demand. Just an update to follow the bitcoin value, $72,441,993,792 something like 12x then March report.

the years figure both are good idea but the price 10 to 20 years for bitcoin 20,000$ are lower i think 50,000$ is the fair value for that long tome because bitcoin has have faster movement in the cryptoworld, and the near future bitcoin to become powerful and many campanies are invested to the bitcoin and accept as currency.

Even if you say so five years is not enough time to make bitcoin very convincing, its 5 years development is amazing but we do not know what will happen in the future. To really make sure we may have to see performance 10-20 years ahead.

I don't think tech savvy is the case any longer for adoption.  An individual no more requires tech "savvyness" beyond understanding an account number and how to make transactions.  Pretty much the same thing as a regular bank account today.  We just need to learn to simplify our explanations to the masses.

Yeah it may take some time for bitcoin to be really known by the masses since it has not been existing for long unlike gold that has been existing since time immemorial and everyone knows gold even if a person is already old and not into technology unlike bitcoin that only people that has access to internet knows about it and many still don't know even if they have access. If time comes that everyone will know about it, maybe if the people who are alive then were born when bitcoin is already known and being used as currency or store of value.

It is hard for bitcoin now to have massive adoption and be known since some countries ban the use of it but I am still positive that someday they will still let its people use it if they see that other countries have reap the benefits of using bitcoin and regulating it. Japan, Korea and other countries are already starting to regulate it and other countries may follow suit if they see the advantage of using it over fiat money.

Yes that is unbeliable, i just can not realize why bitcoin is still so cheap, it has a lot of ways to grow toward four digits. I think we need more promotion. But at the moment bitcoin is just like the gold, but the electronic gold, and ethereum represents the electronic silver.
But yes, bitcoin is obviously gonna reach those prices, it is unstoppable.

soon bitcoin price will reach four digits like you said, but until that time is come, i think we need to spread the news about bitcoin to many places and not just in one or two country but in all country. it will need big efforts from us (bitcoin community) to make bitcoin is in every where so people will know and use bitcoin for daily life. beside that, we need to united and work together to spread about bitcoin,

Correct, right now the best investment option between the two is very clear, bitcoin is the best hands downs and that is why a significant amount of the money I’m holding is on bitcoin since I think it is going to be the next big thing, similar to what happened with the internet.

That is why bitcoin seen to be at the infancy stage and a baby compared to were gold is.  We should keep investing in bitcoin as it seen we may really get to four digits before end of 2018. We can all testify the significant and important of bitcoin to the world economic today. Bitcoin is actually contribute to the world economic more than many Worlds physical assets. Hope we sustain this progress beyond 2020. I seriously believe bitcoin is not in bubble yet.

I think it is only natural that something like bitcoin was created, gold is great but in the current society you cannot expect people to use gold anymore for every singlet thing, now most of the economy is moving through online accounts so more than gold we need bitcoin to met that demand