Adoption is important because it brings new people and new capital in the market. With time, bigger adoption, the market will have more people, from investors to speculators and traders, they all contribute to bigger trading volume in the market. With bigger trading volume, big investors have one more reason to join it because they will have less trouble to enter and exit the market with big capital.
Trading and investment is also speculation, because Bitcoin is a speculative asset. The difference is only in time preferences. And I wasn't talking about market adoption, I was talking about other use case adoption, like payments or store of value. Those other uses are so low that they don't have influence on the price.
I agree about zero-sum game. It is true for traditional markets like stock market too.
Stock market is not a zero sum, because companies manufacture goods and provide services - they create something valuable for society and a lot of people benefit from it. So with stocks you can get dividends, but with Bitcoin you can only get profit if someone buys it.Bitcoin is a paradigm shifting technology that brings a lot of new innovations to the world, so it would be problematic to be attempting to overly-simplify bitcoin as if it were not adding additional value to the world.
Sure, from time to time, bitcoin is going to appear as if it is nothing more than a speculative stock, yet you seem to be missing something if you are pigeonholing bitcoin in that kind of a way.
I could not exactly figure out what BIG beef there is with Plan B's model which has some similar dynamics as the Powerlaw theories, and yeah, I don't claim to know the math exactly, yet I still would say fuck the math to the extent to which there are attempts to try to be precise in regards to how fast various aspects of bitcoin's growth is taking place. Yeah, sure, no problem some of that can be attempted to be modeled out and captured in math, but it also ONLY goes so far, even if we might be considering the [ur=https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-seven-network-effects-of-bitcoin/l]seven network effects that Trace Mayer outlined in 2014/2015-ish[/url].
@hatshepsut93, I often times see the discussion about how the stock market is not a zero sum game as there is production and dividends involved, but BTC represents a zero sum game for investors. Let me give you another example and you can see for yourself what you think about it:
There is option pricing theory because values can be calculated and assigned to so called options in the stock/options market. But the functionality of options is far more sophisticated than you might think at first glance. It supports price discovery, meaning it can give the average Joe an idea of how the market collectively assesses the risk-opportunity ratio of a certain asset/debt instrument. Then there is the subjective value of an option as investors, traders or any other actors (I will explain that in a second) can have different views on the objectively calculated value of an option. Risk exposure can vary even if the numerical value at risk is objectively the same.
If someone wants to escape from their home country because they are afraid of political persecution, what options do they have to take with them any of their assets without seeing it getting frozen or themselves getting stopped at the national boarder? What option does the average Joe have to anonymously store wealth (not talking about illegal strategies) like the rich guys do in Panama and the Virgin Islands without paying a fortune for tax advisers and lawyers to not make any easy and costly mistakes? What option does someone have to donate to a cause they consider worthy of support without getting politically/socially/financially cancelled (truckers protesting against Corona measures in Canada, Wikileaks etc)? What about escaping an inflationary financial system? And how does anyone make sure whether the published numbers about money supply measures M1, M2, M3 etc. (depending on where you live, definitions can differ) are true?
BTC has a very high and real time price discovery mechanism. You could argue that you own a piece of art or antique thing that is worth a lot and you could take it with you anywhere in the world and sell it there, but you'd probably never know what you get. Markets differ for illiquid things or collector's items. In arts some people pay a premium because they "love" a piece. This doesn't apply to BTC. We have seen premiums being paid in countries with high inflation. There is a reason for that.
The range of possibilities is big here as individuals can have different causes they think can be well served by BTC. Options carry value without paying dividends.
There are a few things that I don't get when it is said that the BTC price follows Power Laws. There are plenty of examples for natural systems and how they follow Power Laws, like cancer - a tumor. But the difference is that the cancer cells don't listen to mathematicians calculating Power Law distributions and then react to those calculations. Predicting the size of a tumor with no exogenous interventions (aka treatments) does make sense to me. But when we look at economic entities, they do listen to what is propagated publicly and adjust their actions according to their expectations. Assuming that Santostasi's prediction about the price of BTC being at $1 million in 2033 and $10 million in 2045 is now pushed as a public agenda, wouldn't the result be that in anticipation of the law holding true, people would act faster than initially anticipated and buy BTC? What if nobody came up with the Power Law theory and Santostasi kept it secret? Can it still be considered "organic growth according to Power Laws" when now we'd see the biggest financial players sophisticatedly push the Power Law agenda through media that they partially control? What about some dictator going nuts, bombing the world with nuclear rockets, destroying wealth everywhere, good or bad for the price of BTC?
Cancer is already very complex, but I think that the microscopic analysis allows to feed in data into models at every second and then let AI calculate correlation and - where possible - causation. But I think that the world as a whole is probably a more complex organism than a tumor (at least I think so). As I read in some article, there can be viruses and what not and that is why these predictions like BTC price follows Power Laws can backfire tremendously for people who base their decisions on (perhaps) false hopes coming from fancy formulas.
There are so many ifs in terms of what has to hold true over such a long time in order for the Power Law BTC price theory
to be valid that I am doubtful this prediction makes fully sense. If someone asked me what this world will be looking like in six months from now, I have no idea. Could be insane logistic chaos because three more wars broke out by the time or other wars intensified to a level where global logistics collapse with unpredictable consequences.
) it's always nice to see a mathematical formula in action 
