Throughout the existence of Bitcoin, we have seen many outrageous Bitcoin price predictions. Of course, at the beginning even $100 looked like an insane prediction. One of the most famous predictions was John McAfee’s $1 million bet that he posted on Twitter and talked about on many other channels.
At its peak in December 2017, Bitcoin reached almost $20,000 on some exchanges with a total market capitalization of $332 billion. This is the most important metric for Bitcoin if we want to truly understand if $1 million is feasible. A $300 billion valuation or market capitalization is definitely big, but how much bigger can it get?
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Comparison of Bitcoin’s Market Capitalization to the Top Publicly Traded Companies
Let’s take a look at the largest publicly traded companies in the world thanks to Dogsofthedow:
Top public US companies by market cap – Dogsofthedow
Apple is the clear winner with a whopping $1.9 trillion market cap. Yes, that’s in trillions! There are currently 4 companies with a market cap higher than $1 trillion, followed by Facebook at $764 billion. Mastercard is currently at $328 billion, basically the peak market cap of Bitcoin.
Clearly a single company can reach $1 trillion, and Apple is almost at $2 trillion. Let’s simply use the entire Bitcoin supply, ignoring lost coins. If we take 21 million Bitcoin, to reach a market cap of $1.9 trillion, Bitcoin price would need to hit $90,500
Now to get to $1 million per Bitcoin, we would reach a $21 trillion market capitalization for Bitcoin. This would be 11 times higher than Apple, or higher than the first combined market cap of the top 50 companies. Now that’s definitely a huge market cap.
Comparison of Bitcoin’s Market Capitalization to the World’s Total Money
If BTC’s price were to reach $1 million, its market cap would sit at $21 trillion. We already know that. Now let’s take a look at this amazing metric put up by VisualCapitalist.
World’s total M1 and M2 money supply – VisualCapitalist
According to them, the total value of the world’s ‘easily accessible money’ is around $35 trillion and the total value of the world’s money is close to $100 trillion, which would be 5 times higher than Bitcoin’s current market cap.
However, this doesn’t paint the full picture. For instance, the total estimated value of the world’s real estate is around $280 trillion. Bitcoin’s price and market capitalization could reach $21 trillion even if the world’s total accessible money wasn’t higher than $21 trillion, as it is a different asset class.
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What Bitcoin Would Need to do or Become to Ever Reach $1 Million
We have seen that some assets can definitely reach over $21 trillion in total market cap. These assets however, are global and present everywhere. For instance, real estate is virtually everywhere, Bitcoin would need to do the same in some way.
For Bitcoin to reach $1 million, it would basically have to become a global digital currency used by hundreds of millions every day. The value of Bitcoin is not purely speculative, even though most of its current valuation derives from it. There is also some intrinsic value thanks to miners and their costs. But for the most part, we could say that Bitcoin’s price and market cap are still heavily determined by the market and speculations.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin seems to be taking a different path than originally intended. Instead of becoming a global currency, it is morphing into a ‘safe haven’ or some sort of long-term investment tool. A digital gold of sorts. The current market cap of the world’s entire gold supply sits at $13 trillion. If Bitcoin’s market cap were to reach that, it would mean a price of $620.000 per BTC! Certainly not a bad price.