I tried to get some insight in the numbers of coins in circulation and as far as I can retrieve values this is what I came up with.
All in Million
BTC 14.5
LTC 41
DGB 4,635
XRP 31,908
Doge 100,308
Euro 1,041,902 (ECB)
US Dollar 3,919,529
Yen 85,662,000
The above FIAT values are retrieved from the M0 money supply from
www.tradingeconomics.com and the cryptos from coinmarketcap.com
Thank you for sharing. We would love getting some ecomic analysis on this. Especially in relation to prevailing and historic economic theories.
I would love to but every paralel with FIAT and it's theories would fail.
The reason for this is that we don't have a currency situation here. DGB is traded as a commodity. But when it comes to current usage the latter is not true either because if I try to figure out a parallel with the current monetary system DGB is used as a debitcard. You use FIAT to load your wallet with DGB and pay goods. The merchant however changes the DGB back to FIAT. Used in this way DGB is worthless. It's a way of transporting FIAT, your Master or Visa do not have a value either. They are also storage and transport mechnisms for FIAT.
So the only way to get it used as a currency is people paying with it and keep the coins to pay someting else. The first step to get people NOT changing the coins back to FIAT is usability and trust. The more place you can use it to pay the less reason one has to change it back. Second thing is the fact you need to rely on the coin. When you keep the coins to pay for something you need to be sure it does not inflate overnight by 10 or worse percent. So stability is key here, but raises other problems. FIAT is widely spread but stability is watched and maintained by buying and selling of a central organisation (FED, ECB whatsoever). For crypto in general there is a call for decentralisation and transparency so the old economic system does not work here anymore because that relies on centralisation. One big difference is the fact that the money supply is not regulated and with a central stabilisation organisation you would only bring trust because it stabilises the swings. Thats done right now with some coins by investors.
If I take a step back and look at the coins discussion and how many would be needed I'm tempted to say it really does not matter because there are too much uncertainties. When Satoshi designed BTC he gave it eight decimal digits if you take that difference with FIAT in account BTC has 14,500,000 milliion ucoins compared to FIAT and still the possibity to use two decimals. But there is a psychological effect that is pretty important. In Europe, when the Euro was introduced they gave the Euro a value that was twice the DMark and the Guilder, twenty times the Belgium Frank and so on. That way people got the impression the goods where cheaper... So the Euro was accepted more easily. In that light the number of uBTC is too much compared to the US Dollar but not compared to the global FIAT around! And also not when we use BTC instead of uBTC.
Second issue here is the acceptation of eight decimal digits, I personally have a feeling people will stick to the current two decimals for the years to come. That said a global coin would need under 4,000,000 million coins in the next ten years to compete with the currrent FIAT system on a psychological basis.
I basically agree with your general conclusions THS. The more I read and study price, monetary theory, commodity valuation, capital allocations, etc., the less I am able to apply any of the analysis to digital currency. Currently, I'm pretty hot on the idea of tokenization (my most recent area of economic reading and study) ... that seems to have lots of promise related to the blockchain and implementations of the blockchain. Honestly, the best way that I've come up with to value digital currencies is as a financial service (in one form or another).
But, that doesn't mean that I don't believe in the future of digital currency. I do ... it's got a great future - and the opportunities for growth and applications of the blockchain are just fantastic. I think that DGB has some real competitive advantages in this area.
Also, I recognize that all this is complicated because economics is largely a study of political and social questions and problems expressed in terms of financial systems. There are important political and social implications of digital currencies in identity economics. And, I think that identity economics provide an important context for the discussion of digital currencies as "currency" and as "commodity."