This thread talks about existing markets but what about non-existant markets?
One almost universal mistake made in long-term price targets is the
ceteris paribus fallacy. The idea is that Bitcoin will be used for everything that gold and fiat money is used for today, and
everything else will stay the same. The reasoning goes, "If Bitcoin takes over the world, the price will reflect the value of what it took over: gold's functionality as a store of value, PayPal's transactional functionality, and the money supply of the world's currencies." Such estimates generally put the target price between $100,000 and several million dollars (in today's dollars).
That's a bit like arguing, in 1994, that email will be worth the value of the postal system.
Looking to a future year when the entire global economy is denominated in bitcoins, 1 BTC won't just be worth ~1/21,000,000 of
today's global output. It won't just be worth ~1/21,000,000 of whatever the global output would have been in that year if Bitcoin had never arisen. It will be worth ~1/21,000,000 of the global output of a
Bitcoin-enabled world.
A world with friction-free commerce, small and relatively much more efficient government (if any), absolutely booming business thanks to predictable "monetary policy" and market-defined interest rates and free stock markets, and a radically internationalized division of labor. Any one of those four should be enough to increase global output by an order of magnitude, if not more. But all four of them at once? Not to mention all the future applications like escrow, smart property, assurance contracts, distributed autonomous corporations (DACs) and autonomous agents, etc.
Given all that, and taking into account how all of this is included in the binary bet, I think the target price should be in the
billions per coin. The timescale is less clear, but probably within a decade after mainstream adoption is reached.
Anyone with an mBTC will be set for life.
EDIT: To be clear, the price target for
initial mainstream adoption probably is between $100,000 and $10,000,000 or so. I'm guessing $1 million as a conservative target. But once the dust settles we start into the economy-wide effects of a Bitcoin world and continue up a few more orders of magnitude in not very many years.