OP you are limiting Bitcoin's potential by thinking it can only be as valuable as gold and therefore only attain a price of $650k.
Bitcoin is much much more useful than Gold. I mean if it wasn't, there wouldn't be much reason for it to exist.
Gold has a little bit of its market value in its use in electronics. Gold has a lot of its market value in jewelry and other uses of it for aesthetic or ceremonial purposes. But I believe most gold is stored in vaults and used simply as a store of value. Bitcoin doesn't have the electronics and aesthetics/ceremonial uses like Gold does, it only has the monetary use. But Bitcoin is orders of magnitude better in its monetary use case than Gold is.
Aristotle defined what money is. He came up with these 4 necessary criteria:
- a store of value
- portable
- divisible
- durable
The only money that meets these criteria is precious metal. Oil does not meet all 4. Neither does land. And neither does currency, because central banks print it to infinity so it ends up losing all of its value.
BTC outperforms gold in the sense that it scores better for being divisible. It's easier.
However as part of durability, BTC will not erode over time but I am extremely worried about hackers and governments taking down exchanges and basically stealing all of our BTC via the law or via raw theft.
I don't even know if it is safer to leave BTC on something like Binance or on a ledger, because both are attacked by hackers and by the government. That is hard to overcome.
I am currently checking out videos of ledger users and the amount of threats is ridiculous.
Thieves presenting themselves as Ledger staff. Address poisoning. Spam that results in a drained account if you click on it.
It never stops.
And if Ledger gets hacked again, everything is gone.
Bitcoin outperforms all four of those things compared to Gold by a wide margin.
- Bitcoin is obviously orders of magnitude more portable than Gold.
- Bitcoin is far more divisible, in that it is entirely trivial to divide Bitcoin by Satoshis, while Gold is much harder to divide into precise amounts (break it and measure it or melt it and measure it).
- Bitcoin is a much better store of value than Gold because its scarcity is perfectly known and therefore it has much better scarcity.
- Both Bitcoin and Gold are durable, though I guess you could say Bitcoin wins this too because Bitcoin can literally never be turned into anything not Bitcoin, whereas it is physical possible to change elements into other elements but its hard enough that the ability to do this is neglible. So I would say Bitcoin and Gold are equally durable.
I'm not sure why you are associating hacks with Bitcoin durability. Hacking has nothing to do with durability. That's like saying Gold isn't durable because it can be stolen. That's not the definition of durability. And why are you so worried? You can store Bitcoin yourself, that's kind of the whole point of it! There is no reason you have to store your Bitcoin with an exchange or with Ledger or any specific thing. You can keep it yourself. But anyway, this has nothing to do with durability.