Is it easier to buy illegal stuff with BTC than $? In certain situations, yes.
Does that give officials a motive to go against BTC? Not really.

Reason: Amazon gift cards are a better way to buy illegal stuff with in all situations where BTC would be better than the $.

I think it's important to realize that 100 billion $ makret cap doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are worth that much. It's simply the result of recent trades scaled up. Simple logic really, but to finish pointing out the obvious, you can neither sell or buy all Bitcoins for 46.6 billion. If you were really lucky, you could've bought 1.9 billion $ worth of bitcoin for around 2850$/BTC in the past 24h. In my estimation there is about 10% of the Bitcoin supply being sold/traded/used, the rest sits in it's users wallets for better times/worse times/or even forever.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that compared to the price of a single BTC/ETH/or other altcoin, the market cap is a really insignificant and inacurate measurement of value.

According to THIS Story, there's a gentleman in the UK who was mining bitcoin for a long time in the early stages of it's appearance on his laptop which he later tossed out. More than 300'000 of them.

So if we add this to the numbers here, we can assume that about BTC450'000 have been lost that we know of. That's almost 3% of the available BTC as of today.

Now what number of BTC is truly lost forever, I'd estimate is around 10% of the current supply. About 5 Billion Dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

Well, if we asume that there is such a thing as the "final bitcoin" and asume that it's bitcoin. It would be in the situation that BTC reaches 100% market adoption and penetration. Which means that every transaction will be made with Bitcoin. Now to express the value of such a coin in Dollar terms is pointless, because that one will not exist anymore. I could go on as to what would be worth considering and what not, but in the end it all boils down to this.

One Bitcoin would have a buying power of 1/(21000000 minus lost BTC) of the whole world's economy.

In today's dollars one could argue that it would be M3 (80.9 trillion dollars). If you want to count all the debt as money too (which our system does) it would be a bit over 200 trillion Dollars. If you want to include derrivatives, you'll be looking at something in the ballpark of 1 quadrillion Dollars.

So the answer you're looking for: Millions if not Billions of todays dollars.

Classic Veritaseum topic. Yes Ethereum is faster. /close thread.