rational market hypothesis suggests that if btc will reach the market cap of gold within 15-20 years, today's prices would be much higher, maybe in $5000-6000 territory, otherwise yearly appreciation would be too high: about 40% ea year for 20 years.
Your calculations seem a bit off.
Currently, the market cap of bitcoin is a bit over $10 billion, and the market cap of gold is a bit under $10 trillion. That is not quite, but approximately a 1,000x difference in market cap.
For argument sake, let's say that the difference is only 500x to give the benefit of the doubt to a lower bitcoin value, but a 500x increase in bitcoin's market cap is going to cause the unit price to go up 500x also, and 500x of the current BTC price is approximately $650 x 500 = $325,000. Sure a lot has to happen in order for bitcoin to reach such levels of adoption, but you gotta consider that if bitcoin comes even close to what folks are projecting to be bitcoin potentiality, we are talking about numbers that are magnitudes greater than the $5k to $6k price per unit territory which is currently a 10x increase in BTC from current prices.
I have no problem with posters projecting various bullish or bearish scenarios, but we are attempting to describe potential equivalencies with other asset classes, we should at least attempt to get the numbers kind of right, no?
I guess i did not make my point clear, which was that for bitcoin to be at 500K 20 years from now, yearly appreciation has to be 40% ea year on average for 20 years (unlikely), while if bitcoin ALREADY was $5000 (instead of current $650), it would have to be a more moderate 26%/year for 20 years (slightly more realistic).
Basically, markets would have already boosted current btc price much further IF we had high probability (in market's opinion) of 500K/btc by 2036. Example: markets boosted yahoo price to 250bil in early 2000 when they perceived Yahoo as a leading Internet company. That valuation was not supported by anything, but a market foreseeing the importance of Internet, with value eventually flowing from shrinking yahoo to Google, then facebook.
Thanks for that clarification. It seems that I must have either misunderstood your point, or maybe I was just inclined to attempt to take the conversation in a slightly different direction... hahahahahaha
Sure, more or less, I agree about your almost common sensical point that it is a lot easier to get to an even higher price point if we have already achieved a higher price point, but the reality of the matter is all of that is relative. We cannot really judge where bitcoin is or where bitcoin should be based on making some kind of comparison to Yahoo or the internet.. Yeah, sure, the internet and Yahoo are probably somewhat analogous in terms of their paradigm changing contributions, but we also have not ever seen anything, ever before, like bitcoin, so limiting its upwards potential based on where it is and where it is projected to potentially go seems to attempt to oversimplify the matter and possibly failing/refusing to recognize some of the potential for a kind of upward explosion (even if that upward explosion potential has a pretty low probability of actually taking place).
Also, when you average it out, year by year, you also seem to be attempting to downplay any kind of weirdness and irrationality that likely comes from an upward explosion that is really difficult to assess or to even understand the snowballing.. that is currently within the unknown.. and yeah, snowballing is not inevitable and upwards is certainly not inevitable either.. and looking at something retrospectively would allow for an assessment and even an averaging out of years, but it remains quite difficult to attempt to categorize and contain predictions within rational bounds and to describe upward bounds as a kind of linear, rather than having exponential potential... that has already kind of been demonstrated to be within the realms of possibility within bitcoin, no? look at 2010? 2011? 2013? And, where is bitcoin now? gosh... bitcoin is quite a bit more positively developed compared with those earlier years and earlier experiences of exponential growth, no?
I repeat that I am not saying that any kind of exponential growth is inevitable.. I am just saying that exponential growth needs to be considered as within the realm of possibilities, even if you only place such realm of possibilities at .001%