Bitcoin Forum

The combined market value of all cryptocurrencies in circulation has pushed beyond the significant milestone of $30 billion yesterday for the first time ever, underlining the ever-expanding interest in digital currencies and the blockchain technology. The altcoin market has soared since the turn of the year with the likes of Ethereum, Dash, Monero and Ripple making significant gains.

How much do you think the cryptocurrency market will grow?

$100 billion in two years, half of that will be Bitcoin with the price of ~$3000, half the others.

With the price of Bitfinex and other Bitcoin Exchanges that are all rising in price with a premium attached to it allows the marketcap of Bitcoin to go up dramatically.
The calculation of the marketcap doesn't really matter anyhow.

Isn't marketcap just the number of coins times price of said coin?

it will compete the penny stock market and may even be more. bitcoin is huge enough that can be listed on NASdaq as they say so 30 billion is just a small milestone for cryptomarketcap. crypto is the future so this will soon be more than 100 Billion.  i wish to have more of these because i rely my  retirement program to crypto. :)

I think that it is definitely going to be a great decade for bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies.

I think that altcoins are becoming the new trend, and obviously altcoins are having a much larger market share now that a lot more of these new projects are being launched, and existing projects like Ethereum are becoming more popular.

I'd say at least $50 billion by the end of the decade, and obviously that is an extremely conservative number. If you offered me a double or nothing bet on that i'd take it anyday :)

I think the most remarkable fact is not so much the absolute amount, but rather the tendency away from bitcoin.

http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage

While the total market cap shows a rather smooth parabolic growth, there has been a sudden shift from bitcoin to "alt coins" in general. The most remarkable fact to me is that this quite violent movement away from bitcoin has almost not affected the global curve.

I can see 3 possible views on this:

- crypto is doing away with bitcoin's total dominance, and the market becomes more homogeneous and open, without this absolute dominance of bitcoin (which doesn't mean that bitcoin as a market leader is done already, but it is not a monopoly any more and its long term first place loss is a matter of time and erosion).

- this has been the hugest alt-coin pump and dump in history, and after all is said and done, when all altcoin believers have been shaked out of their last penny, all of this is going back to bitcoin

- there's going to be a natural ratio between highly speculative greater-fool money in alt coins and "safe heaven" bitcoin, not meant to be a risky quick growth stock any more, but a mature savings account.

The word is out now. Crypto is going to grow in popularity with speculators and the current ease of access makes it even more attractive.

Whilst this is the wild west it will all continue to grow and grow.

That and the growing interest and use from every sector and i think this pump may not just be a pump like we saw in 2013 it could be the start of a huge influx of interest in this arena from all types of people for all types of reasons.

At this stage I am almost expecting LTC to topple BTC in MC in the future although Im sure tptb in bitcoin will come to some agreement before that.

yea but add to that new ICOs are comming out every day new systems are rising all time.
There infinite infinite number of tokens that can be created in 2 years we can have new top 10 and ETH can be history ^^ same as others. New people are entering scene and want free $$$ so they
"invest" - sorry they are gambling

Sad part of it is that 95% of those crypto was builded to just make developers rich in 2-3 years we will see what will work. In 10 years BTC can be even forgotten but will have speculative value as 1st crypto ever so this one will always have value. You can buy BTC like old collectable coin even if it won't scale at all.

Yea crypto will grow but will be dumped too man ^^ bull market won't last forever.
Since we have infinite money printing policy we can enjoy the party.

Yap as i read thru those articles, i regretted leaving this site last year. i was active during the times where the 1btc was still 600$. More and more investors are comming in. Speculations also suggest that even millionaires who dont know btc are investing in ICO's. Other speculations may also change if the identity of satoshi would be revealed.

Cryptocurrency is fast rising as the world is realizing the potential of it and how it could change the world. This is true everywhere and we might see the turn of the tides when the governments realize that they can harness the power of cryptocurrency by turning their own local currency into a crypto of their own.

Absolutely agree. This growing market cap for crypto is not only expected but arguably disappointing considering the incredible expectations of hodlers. But what took everyone by surprise was the spurt contributed by alts. Good take on the 3 outcomes, at least in the short term. I must confess that the cynical pump and dump view is the one that I find is most likely.

How can you even say that marketcap doesn't really matter?
It tells you how much the project is valued and if there is still room to grow considering lots of fundamental factors, but most importantly, how can you ignore the coin supply? I have made awesome investments in projects that are cool and had very low cap compared with their coin supply, and there has been others where I stay away from because they look toppy considering there's too many coins circulating. That's the benefit of comparing each crypto to one another, and then it also lets you compare different markets (stocks, commodities, precious metals, etc). Market cap is reflected in price action, sometimes you think you are getting a cheap price for a coin, but when you see their cap it might tell you other wise.

For me this is really a good sign that more and more people are going into crypto-currency in the last couple of years or months now. It just show that they are thinking that investing in them in the new wave and revolution. Bitcoin is the dominant crypto and will remain even though there are a lot of alt-coin showing. I don't know how much the crypto market cap will be, but it will moving up in the next years or so.

Well its not that it does not matter it is just that it is too easily manipulated and used to mislead.

but this is merely due to bitcoin that is incresing so much, altcoin in general are increasing against bitcoin, but not all of them and now again some of them are dumped only ethereum can lead the ship of the alt now, the other have very small marketcap which is hardly make any difference

That's true, but what isn't in crypto world? :p

Indeed, I'm pretty sure that this is not a giant manipulation, but true influx of new money.  And at this point, the sky is not the limit, nor the Moon.   However, my idea is that crypto is not what we think it is, and there's something un-real about it.

When we honestly look at the real-world applications of crypto, one cannot say that it has been a big success.  Bitcoin was going to be "money", now we know it won't.  Bitcoin's real-world currency usage is small.  It exists, but it is small, and I don't think, in fact that "replacing fiat" is within its reach, at all.  This goes for about all "currency-oriented" crypto: although there are cases where you can use it profitably as a currency, that remains a small niche.  We won't be paying Arab oil in bitcoin, nor coffee in bitcoin (nor in litecoin, monero or DASH or....).
When we look at the non-currency style applications, like those on top of ethereum, apart from gambling, not much is really doing something that really works well in the real world.  Amazon is not threatened by golem for instance, nor is open bazaar pushing away ebay.

I know, 'give it time', but no.  I think the real world usage of crypto is much less than the hope that linux was going to replace windows on PC.

So why are people poring money into crypto, for promises of functionality in the sky that will, most probably, never really happen ?

Is crypto actually not eating away at the fiat market, but rather at the speculative derivatives market ?  Is crypto just a speculative toy like complicated derivatives are, where the underlying doesn't really matter, but the financial world just needs "random data" to be able to gamble on with some potential manipulation ?

For the moment, most institutional players have no legal access to crypto, so only the smaller big fish can play, but if it is true that crypto is actually eating a small part of the derivatives gambling industry, then not only the sky is not the limit, nor the moon, but actually Sirius or something of the kind, because the derivatives bubble is HUGE, and if crypto only takes one part per million of it, it would be gigantic.

However, derivatives do have a very complicated, half-virtual/half-self-referential, backing in the real economy.  Crypto doesn't: it only has a promise of a megalomania killer application "in the future" (bitcoin was going to replace fiat, ethereum was going to replace lawyers and courts....).

So I won't exclude a big bubble collapse either. 

I would like to add something else:
I'm a believer in the (EMH) efficient market hypothesis (at least in its weak form).  I don't think it is possible, in a fair market, to find out "how to gain systematically more than the average value production of the market".  Yes, you can be lucky and win.  But next time, you might just as well lose.

Now, with bitcoin's dominance, and the obviously growing crypto market, it seems to me that the "deterministic" growth of bitcoin is in contradiction with the EMH: it would be dead-easy: place money in bitcoin, and reap in huge benefits 10 years from now.  Too simple.  If that were somehow true, all smart money would already be in bitcoin.  It isn't.  Ideally, bitcoin's price is always such, that the probability of it going down equals the probability of it going up (even in the long term), unless there is a systematic value production of the whole crypto market, which there isn't really.  So something is wrong.

If, however, the whole crypto market becomes more uniform, and every coin can rise or fall, without a clear and evident domination of one over the other "for eternity", then the crypto market becomes much less predictable, and we close in on the EMH: even though the crypto market *as a whole* can rise spectacularly, if you have been betting on the wrong horses (coins), you may just as well lose as win.  There were crypto was "bitcoin, and some noise from altcoins", and the gain was obviously to be had in bitcoin, with an open, non-dominated market, what is rising one day, may drop to oblivion the next day and one gets a much more opaque (that is EMH), risky, random and totally open market.  The certainties are then over, and I would think that this is a natural evolution of a free market.

This is maybe what we are witnessing: the complete "randomisation" of crypto, where no simple predictions hold, like in a normal gambling stock market.

ATH of bitcoin's price, and ATL of bitcoin's market share...
63.5%. 

There is sufficient evidence to look back and conclude the crypto bull market officially started in the winter of 2016/2017, new money is pouring in. I'm curious what is the closest equivalent of shoeshine boys in the 21st century :)

Yup.  These graphs look outright scary:

http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage

I wonder whether:

1) BTC will soon dip under the 50% market share psychological level
2) if so, whether this will have an impact

or whether the alt coin bubble will pop soon.

Not so soon, I think there are a few months to a year of steaming on before it starts cooling down.

At that rate, bitcoin will be on the 10th position or so by then...  most major alts are growing double digits per 7 days, while bitcoin is at a few percent in 7 days.

Unlikely because the rate of growth in relative terms will be slowing down, especially the alts which have already seen 10-20-30x growth, it will be progressively harder to push their market caps higher. Bitcoin will not be surpassed this year, but the Bitcoin dominance index will be going down, there is no doubting this. The overall market cap of crypto one year from now can easily double.

but that is only thanks to ethereum not because of other alt, if it was not for ethereum all the alt have only a minimal marketcap which make no point in the equation, and yes alt are growing faster but alt have a very low marketcap, it's easy to pump, bitcoin it's harder to pump now with a value of $1300 and more

I think crypto currency will grow is like stocks market right now, but i don't want make speculation about the numbers
i just want make opinions bitcoin and other altcoins like stocks market,
although bitcoin and altcoins there are not dividen like stocks, what I know the movement of digital currencies price
are like movement stocks price and i could used same method of trading.

Fiat are coming into crypto with strength every day thanks to Bitcoin hype. I expect this tendency to continue. A few coming years should be big for cryptocurrencies. This market should grow and altcoins are strong as never.

There is a huge pump and dump going on - but the rise and consolidation of ETH continues, and if bitcoin doesn't resolve it's problems, it will get overtaken.

Yes, and no.  Total market cap 33.4 billion ; bitcoin: 21.2 billion ; ethereum: 5.7 billion ; rest of alts = 6.5 billion.

So the "rest of the market cap" is half ethereum, half the others.

So it is true that ethereum is of course important.  But that the rest of the alts are unimportant, is not true.  It is BTW remarkable that the ratio between BTC and ETH is somehow similar to the ratio between ETH and the next one (about 4).  However, LTC is more than 1/4 of Ripple, DASH is more than 1/4 of LTC etc...
So "pressure is building up" from below.

The market is definitely overheated. I took my profit out and wait for now.

I could name one or two alts that have some real life application for average users... Ether wouldn't even be one of them yet. When did you want to do anything and thought "now it would be practical to have Ether"? It's all just hopes that it might amount to something someday.

The graphs posted here about how the alts rise tell all you need to know: A crazy spike without any real news behind it. There was the BTC/BTU controversy, but BTU pretty much self-destructed by now. Compare the spike to the past, and you also see that it happened before, and corrected itself before.    
You already have tons of threads here desperate to find new things to throw money at. A boom mostly born out of greedy speculation will also turn into an irrationally strong crash to flush out the bad money.  
Might still be a month or two - but it will happen.

It may be true that the market is overheated and what you did is wise. There is this problem with taking profits though: what is this default stable money in which one can safely take profits and sit on the fence waiting it out? Every money out there has its set of problems, some long running alts may not be so problematic compared to what we traditionally have come to think of as stable money.

I can't think of a single one, bitcoin included.  All of crypto is delusion if one thinks of "mainstream adoption".  There ARE useful crypto concepts out there, for niche applications (usually not those that one likes to talk about).  And there's a gigantic delusion: bitcoin (and imitators) will be the money of the future ; ethereum (and other smart contracts) will be the law and contracts of the future.  None of this is realistic, but this megalomania delusion is simply necessary to give a "story of credible future economic value" to the whole scene ; while in reality they are just financial gambling tokens ; like most of the actual derivative market is, also: the true usage of derivatives as hedging tools in a specific market is a microscopic part of the derivative market as a whole which is nothing else but a big casino.  Apart from "geeks having invented their own version of a derivative market, allowing anyone to gamble", I can't see any single mainstream usage of this stuff.  But niches, yes.  Of course.  Crypto, however, is not about its real world usage.  It is about it being gambling tokens (and essentially a greater-fool game) ; but it needs a delusional story behind it to create the illusion of future economic value.


But that's the essence of the financial world in general, and crypto in particular. 

From the looks of it, could make it there in 1 year.

we're in the last weeks of this bullmarket. The age of Karhu will be upon us once again.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Karhu_%28emblem%29.png/250px-Karhu_%28emblem%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Karhu_%28emblem%29.png/250px-Karhu_%28emblem%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Karhu_%28emblem%29.png/250px-Karhu_%28emblem%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Karhu_%28emblem%29.png/250px-Karhu_%28emblem%29.png

almost everyday will be an "all-time high" for the next years

I wrote this less than 2 weeks ago !

The situation now: total market cap: 51.8 billion ; bitcoin 27.1 billion ; ethereum 8.5 billion ; rest of alts = 16.2 billion of which XRP, with 7.2 billion, is now taking half of it. 

It is interesting to see that ethereum, who was on par with "the rest of alts" is now only "half of the rest of alts", and that the "rest of alts" is now having half ripple, half the rest of the rest.

This really goes in the direction of the market fully diversifying over alts.

I read similar story on http://www.coindesk.com this morning and confirming it here again I am very happy for the current development not only in bitcoin but also in altcoins. The market capitalization has increase significantly for the past three weeks and it is a sign of good things to come.

If we multiply the BTC price x 10, we will have a market cap of a little bit under 300 billion dollars. This is a lot of money? Yes. For what BTC and other cryptocurrencies represents? Not so much. This is the value of a large company in USA stock market and when we are talking about fiat currencies, almost nothing. So, it is plausible to have a much bigger market cap if more solutions using cryptocurrencies are delivered in the next months.