150 transactions in 30 minutes is 7200 transactions a day.
That's about where bitcoin was in 2012. 5 years ago.
Remarkably, the price of a BTC then wasn't very far from a LTC now.
That is a fascinating observation and consistent with the fact that the real value of a currency is in its economy and take-up, not its technology.
For a real currency, that's obviously the case. This is given by Fisher's formula. The amount of economic value bought by a fluid currency determines its market cap. Of course, the tricky thing in that equation is the money velocity, but a fluid currency has a velocity of the order of a few units to a few tens of units, unless it is a very very fluid one.
In Fisher's formula, we have:
Q = the economic value bought with the currency (and hence, indirectly, the economic utility of the currency system itself)
P = the number of currency tokens for a unit of economic value (in which Q is expressed, for instance, "Big Mac": P is the price of a Big Mac in the currency at hand ; but we can also take "dollars", if we consider dollars as representative for economic value in the short term, which is true)
M = the monetary mass (the amount of currency units in circulation)
V = the monetary velocity (usually between 1 and a few times 10, or bigger if it is just a "transition token").
Note that the "price of a currency unit" is 1/P.
Fisher's formula is : Q . P = M . V, from which: Q = V . M/P
Now, M/P is what we call the market cap of the currency.
So we see that normally, the market cap of a currency should me the economy bought by the currency, divided by the velocity which is 1 - 10 or bigger if the currency is transitional.
In other words, the market cap, times 10 or so, should be the estimation of the economy bought by the currency. Well, *no crypto ever did that*, which indicates that no crypto's price is ever driven by its usage as a currency.
No, bitcoin's yearly economy bought as a currency is not $300 billion. If bitpay is an indication, we're on the order of $300 million a month, or maybe $3 billion a year.
But bitpay indicates QUICK velocity. The holding time is not of the order of a month, because the conversion to fiat is done quickly. This would boost velocity even further. So grossly, you could say that bitcoin, being an "intermediate currency", is supposed to have higher velocity than fiat currency that is "kept through the month when spending one's salary". The bitpay model would indicate velocities that would get closer to 100 than to 1. That would mean that, if the total economy of bitcoin is, let's be large, 10 billion a year (the amount of stuff really bought with bitcoin as a currency), bitcoin's market cap should be $100 million.
So we see that no crypto currency's price, and especially not bitcoin, is driven by its "economic value as a currency". It is PURE SPECULATION.
And that's because of bitcoin (and all crypto's) speculative emission curve and the absence of price stabilizing mechanism (on the contrary, all of them hope for "moon"). This is what makes me conclude that the currency usage of crypto is not considered by the market.
