So I made some calculations today.
The total world's wealth is estimated around $241,000,000,000,000 (
source), the total value of all the gold in the world is $7,290,669,617,313 (
source) and bitcoin's market cap as of now is $6,382,047,520 (
source).
This basically means that gold represents 3% of the total world's wealth and that bitcoin is only worth 0.0026% of it. In other words, by comparing bitcoin directly to gold: the total value of all bitcoins is 0.087% (or 1/1142) of the total value of all the gold that there is. Looking at it from this point of view bitcoin can easily get to 4 digits. It then seems pretty down-to-earth to say that we will definitely get there before 2020 if nothing goes wrong. 6 digits though, would put us very close (or even above) gold's value, which is hard to imagine at the moment. The millions have already been made but there is still a lot of money to be made with bitcoin and we now have something that pioneers didn't have: stability. Stability is a great thing because it allows for a reliable store of value. I thinks we've actually reached a pretty good balance between prospects and safety of investment.
In other words: we're only waiting for metallurgists to find a way to melt tungsten and gold together. Ok we might have to wait for a while
.
(Also, Ethereum's market cap is already $1,061,551,795, roughly 17% of bitcoin's. Meanwhile everyone is still wondering what the heck it can be good for and no one seems quite sure that the price is high enough as is
.)