Liew and Smith base all their assumptions on BTC beeing number one cryptocurrency forever.
Bitcoin has been the top-performing currency in the world in six of the past seven years, climbing from zero to a value of about $1,190.
Yes, but they forget it was the only currency for the first few years. It's not hard being top performing if you're the only one.
"Expats sending money home have found in Bitcoin an inexpensive alternative, and we assume that the percentage of Bitcoin-based remittances will sharply increase with greater Bitcoin awareness," the two say.
I think they assume wrong. Bitcoin was inexpensive alternative to fiat transfers. Now there are other cryptos out there, that are cheaper, faster and technically superior alternative to BTC. Take for example Monero, Zcash, ZEN, DASH, just to name a few. They're all faster and cheaper than BTC and also offer annonimity. They lack the wide adoption BTC has, but as more and more people join the cryptospace and learn about other, more convenient technologies than BTC, BTC will be loosing it's dominance, And I'm sure even more advanced cryptos will come out in the future.
Liew and Smith said increased political uncertainty in the UK, US and in developing nations would help elevate the level of interest in bitcoin.
It will help to increase interest in all cryptocurrencies not just BTC.
GSMA, a trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, believes 90% of these users will come from developing countries.
This will make it possible for nearly everyone to have a bank in their pocket, and that should provide a boost for bitcoin as well. Liew and Smith say bitcoin could account for 50% of all of these transactions.
Yes those people from developing countries will use their phones for crypto transactions. But there will be many more suitable currencies to make the transfers than BTC. Take a look at OMG for example.
A bitcoin price of $1,000 in 2017.
That network users will grow 61x from now until 2030. "Put another way, we need a population of bitcoin users around a quarter of the Chinese population (or 5% of the global population) in 2030 to see bitcoin at $500k," Liew and Smith told Business Insider. Bitcoin's user network grew from 120,000 users in 2013 to 6.5 million users in 2017, or about 54x, and this could be just the beginning. Growth of that magnitude would produce 400 million users in 2030.
The average value of bitcoin held per user hits $25,000. " As institutional investor cash in Bitcoin, sophisticated investors trading Bitcoin, and Bitcoin-based ETFs proliferate, we think the average Bitcoin value held will increase to around $25k per Bitcoin holder," Liew and Smith said. Currently, with a market cap of $16.4 billion, and 6.5 million user count, the average user holds $2,515 worth of bitcoin.
Bitcoin's 2030 market cap is decided by number of bitcoin holders multiplied by average bitcoin value held.
Bitcoin's 2030 supply will be about 20 million.
Bitcoin's 2030 price and user count total $500,000 and 400 million, respectively. The price is found by taking the $10 trillion market cap and dividing it by the fixed supply of 20 million bitcoin.
It's important to note that a lot could go wrong, too. News surrounding bitcoin has been rather negative as of a late.
Those are calculations based on assumption BTC will remain the only widely adopted cryptocurrency by 2030. I already explained above, why I think that won't happen.
Let's imagine BTC would continue to represent about 50% of total market cap in 2030. And let's ignore the small inflation because of newly mined coins by that time and make calculation based on the current number of coins 16,596,450. 16,596,450 * 500,000$ = 8,298,225,000,000$ total bitcoin marketcap. People like to compare BTC to gold. The total value of all the mined gold is about 7.680.000.000.000$. So BTC would be worth even more than gold. Gold is so valuable because it's rare, limited and durable. So is BTC. So that makes both good holders of value. And BTC at a few 100K $ might make sense, but the fact is almost any cyptocurrency can be good holder of value. Why would BTC be the only one people would use to store value? Just because it was the first? Wouldn't people rather choose another cryptocurrency that's cheaper and faster to move and anonymous so noone could ever know that you own it? I certainly would.