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I find myself often thinking about the market cap of Bitcoin relative to other asset classes such as silver, gold, bonds, etc. It serves as a good progress bar on the road to hyperbitcoinization and also gives you a good idea of the expected price appreciation given we follow the ‘happy path’.
And the market cap is a very easy thing to calculate for Bitcoin, mined supply times price. Or is it? We all know that 1) some Bitcoin are provably lost and 3) most importantly many Bitcoin are unprovably lost. In my opinion they cannot be counted in the market cap calculation because it’s as if they never have been mined in the first place. At the same time we cannot be sure if they are truly unspendable.
That means the true market cap is probably below 1 trillion at this moment meaning Bitcoin as a lot more price appreciation ahead than expected.
What do you think?
There's a more fundamental problem with the idea of market cap. Bitcoin (and other assets) are worth whatever value people attach to them. The current market price is only a measure of what the marginal value of Bitcoin is; i.e. it's worth more than that price to the last buyer and less to the seller.
Since many of us are not even remotely tempted to sell our Bitcoin at these prices, it's easy enough to state with confidence that the Bitcoin we hold are worth far above the market price to us.
On the other hand, most people still wouldn't buy Bitcoin at any price. It's worth zero to them.
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I think all of the lost coins add more value to the coins that arent lost. More and more coins will be lost in the future. That is part of life.
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The bad thing is that the market interprets that there are 21 million possible coins, or rather 19 and a half million for now, and counts it like this, if the market subtracted the 4 million or so total coins lost, the price would be higher, because it would evaluate Bitcoin as an even scarcer commodity.
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I think the people that are aware of this know the value of their bitcoin. Hence why there are whales, and hence why people hodl for so long.
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Yes, there is a lot of competition within the Bitcoin world to get just 1 Bitcoin, it is an increasingly scarce asset, so valuing Bitcoin is our duty :)
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one is too low of a goal. You should be going after 100!
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100? hahaha, I'll settle for 10
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Im sure if you stay long enough you can make a bitcoin on here. Have to be diligent, though.
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Maybe, but I don't think anyone has won a Bitcoin yet on SN.