One of the issues I have with these wild projections (and its not so much that I disagree), but can we imagine for one second what the world will look like if crypto hits these massive valuations? What does that do to the dollar? And if the dollar is trash, what does that do to the country? The government will no longer be able to function if nobody wants to hold USD. Money printing is of course bad, but no money printing will result in a country that has utterly gone to trash. I just don't think crypto as the main form of currency can co-exist in a world that will be a safe and wonderful place. Governments need to be able to control their currency, even if it means shady stuff happening. If government workers will all end up getting paid one day in BTC or ETH that the government has to source through taxation, since they can't print it, everyone needs to prepare for poverty wages. Furthermore, as much as free money floating around has been highly inflationary, its also what allows innovation in business and technology. Say goodbye to every tech start-up if money is no longer cheap to borrow or acquire. Don't get me wrong, I would love some ethics and reality to come back to our financial markets, but it will be devastating if this happens since the world will look much different and be quite hostile in my opinion.
Q: where is ether being used for payments? A: nowhere bitcoin lightning has now 10k+ channels and it is being used AND it has an actual store of value that everybody wants (El Salvador, hedge funds) underneath it (bitcoin) bitcoin taproot = smart contracts locked in and getting activated in November. Most altcoins will become redundant by then. ether is completely overvalued.
There's roughly zero chance that crypto hits $100 trillion, or anywhere near it. That's about equal to the entire world's stock market cap, and ten times the value of all gold ever mined. A more reasonable high estimate for a major speculative peak would be something like $6T to $10T, or 3x-5x current levels.
According to the data I'm seeing, less than 10 million addresses have more than 0.01 BTC. Nobody knows how much of that is artificially inflated, since a single person can have an unlimited number of addresses. https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html Even that isn't "adoption", it's almost entirely speculation = looking to sell to the greater fool. Pretty much nobody buys or sells goods/services directly in BTC because it doesn't work well as a currency. Using your metric, less than 1 million BTC addresses hold amounts that aren't tiny.
It's very sophisticated Ponzi scheme but well what isn't Ponzi scheme? Fiat money or stock market? Crypto is the space of redistribution of wealth but well if it works, why not? Take it just a space of competition, beauty contest as Keynes said.
You bring up some very valid points. But keep in mind, ether 2.0 will be coming out later this year. And the biggest reason it hasn't gone up higher than it has is because of its transaction fees. When Ether 2.0 comes out with faster transaction speeds (keep in mind it's already faster than Bitcoin) and very cheap transaction fees, you can expect higher value for Ethereum, which is the 2nd most established crypto. Not to mention a lot of institutions are already jumping on it.
When bitcoin went to $1 on par with the good ole USD, nothing happened. When btc went to $100, nothing happened, nor when btc went to $1000, or even when btc went to $10,000 or when btc went to $50,000 where the price is very close to at this time When btc hits $100K before eoy, nothing will happen. When btc hits $500K in 5 years nor when btc hits $1M Nothing will happen to anyone not holding bitcoin and other cryptos, but the people who do own crypto digital assets will benefit greatly