Let's look at how the other top cryptos compare in terms of scarcity. I'd like to call your attention to the "Circulating Supply" column so you can really see the difference in scarcity between Bitcoin and the other cryptos. Then I want you to look at the corresponding price of each so you can really see what impact that scarcity has on price. So does scarcity matter? Absolutely. Is it the only thing that matters? No. Obviously demand is a huge component as well.
Isn't that irrelevant when there are plenty exchanges outside the US jurisdiction that do not do any KYC whatsoever? I would be surprised if any of the top 0.01% bitcoin holders (which control an entire 1/3 of the coins in circulation) actually contained a single American citizen.
You couldn't corner a market or manipulate the market in any significant way using some obscure exchange with little to no volume and no KYC rules. You'd have to go where the liquidity is, and all of the top worldwide exchanges require multiple forms of identification to open an account. You're welcome to verify if you can open an account with these exchanges without disclosing who you are.
Ok question, if I may: Can Mr. Chen or whoever establish residence in the Bahamas, appear on the papers of an offshore shell company and open an account, disclosing his name as contact but later claim deniability if the shell corporation (which he does not own any interest in but merely signed on as hired hand) conducted questionable business? And what if dozens or hundreds of billions of dollars were laundered and "legitimately" passed KYC but those funds were used to deceptively trade bitcoin just to corner the market without repercussions on the regulatory side? If that happened with stocks then at least the SEC (on paper) investigates fictitious trading or spoofing or other regulatory violations. Honest questions. I do not know the answers...
If there was that much fraud involved to corner a trillion-dollar market like Bitcoin, the last thing that the fraudster would have to worry about is some financial regulator. Every criminal investigator on the planet would be on the hunt for that person. Even the most sophisticated hackers and hacking groups are not totally invisible. They just were saying in the news the other day that the REvil ransomware group that attacked the computer systems of the Colonial Pipeline was just busted and shut down in Russia, and that was just for a crime worth millions, not billions. If you fuck over enough people, you're GOING TO BE FOUND. Period.
You're still stuck in the analog way of thinking instead of the digital way. There have been many profound changes in our lives that brought immense value and efficiency through the digitizing process. First, we digitized knowledge. We used to go to Barnes and Noble for physical books to obtain more knowledge. We held physical newspapers. We bought magazines. But then we digitized all that so that knowledge that previously existed in various physical forms now exists as 1's and 0's in digital form. Now we just download the book from Amazon and read it on our kindle. Or instead of buying the magazines or newspapers, we have subscriptions to websites or visit free sites supported by digital advertising instead. Second, we digitized sound, pictures and video. If you wanted to listen to music, in years past that required the purchase of a Vinyl Record, Cassette tape, or CD. Now you just download whatever song you want from an endless collection of millions by using Spotify or Apple Music. We used to buy cameras that could accommodate physical rolls of film, and then later printed those pictures out on paper. Now we can use digital cameras built into our phones and edit those pictures as needed right on the device and send them to anyone on the planet in seconds. We used to put all of our printed photos in albums, and would pull the albums out when we wanted to show photos to family and friends. These days the physical photo album has been digitized as well so now we upload all of our shareable digital photos to Facebook for our family and friends to see whenever they want, regardless of where they live. Watching a video on TV required the purchase of a Beta or VHS tape in past decades and most recently a DVD. Now we can watch anything by streaming it digitally via YouTube or Netflix. And now what you're witnessing today is the digitizing of money. We now understand that money and stores of value don't need to be synonymous with physical objects like paper bills and precious metals. We can construct digital monetary systems like Bitcoin that exhibit all of the properties of excellent money better than any type of money created before, which are: Scarcity: resistance to money supply manipulations and, thus, dilutions to its monetary unit value (difficult to produce) Divisibility: ease of accounting and transacting at various scales (separable and combinable units) Portability: ease of moving value across space (high value to weight ratio) Durability: ease of moving value across time (resilient to deterioration) Recognizability: ease of identifying and verifying the monetary value by other parties in a transaction (universally identifiable and verifiable)
Well nobody in the public domain has the slightest idea about top crypto holders. How is that for a start. Do you truly believe what they tell you in the "news"? The arch enemy of the United States shuts down a network run by their own that furthers their state interests because the Attorney General in New York asks ever so nicely? I don't buy any of this group brain wash for a second. US national security and intelligence services were and still are hopelessly clueless who hacked more than 200 of the largest US corporations. Such things happen multiple times a year and there is no answer nor defense. Sometimes it's important for the prosperity and sense of safety of the lemmings to make people believe that their government has their back when they are totally clueless. Keyword, Havana Syndrome. First accused party was Russia, then Cuba, in fact they have not the slightest idea what happened. But I am sure some USA Today article got the talking points directly from Langley or the Edgar Hoover Building to provide an "explainer".
We've had digitized money for decades. Very little of my financial activity consists of mailing checks anymore (thank god), let alone shipping around stacks of physical cash. Bitcoin is at best a digital near-substitute for gold, trading off some advantages over gold for some special disadvantages/drawbacks. If you want to get an idea of where BTC's market cap might go, start with the total market cap of gold held for investment and apply a discount.
Apply a premium not a discount. TAM is much bigger If you hold gold as an investment asset, can you do the following: Send 100 ounces to a family member in Turkey, Lebanon, or South Korea Get $100K to your bank by the next business day by putting $200K of gold as collateral Purchase a house with mortgage 100% backed by your gold Travel to another country with 100 ounces and spend the value, locally Purchase McDonalds, Pizza Hut , Starbucks, Computer products or book a hotel or a first class flight with your gold Access the value of your gold at midnight on a bank holiday and liquidate your gold With Bitcoin and Cryptos, all the of the above are possible A local bitcoin or crypto wallet can send any amount to anywhere in the world https://blockfi.com/crypto-loans https://celsius.network/crypto-loans https://ledn.io/en/loans-product https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/milo-launches-first-u-s-crypto-mortgage.364281/ https://coinatmradar.com/countries/ El Salvador for any of the food places, NewEgg for computer products and https://www.cheapair.com/ for travel Bitcoin and cryptos trade 24/7/365