just brainstorming here: with 21m bitcoin as max, what happens to the bitcoin after all mined? We just keep using the mined bitcoins with no rewards? I can draw a parallel between this as some currency (e.g.) that can not be printed at all after certain time. With that, the maximum market cap for bitcoin with the current price of 650$ is about 13,5 billion. Now the value can certainly rise and fall depending on how popular it becomes however if it really becomes, i can only see it is rising in value tremendously and forever and only issue hampering its growth is the granularity such that there could be some products whose price can not be represented by a smallest unit of bitcoin: satoshi. But still i think it is long long way to reach to the point. So I just re-imagined, how much the value of bitcoin will be when 1 satoshi equals 1 cents. This milestone is I think is important because once 1 satoshi start equalling more than 1 cents, we started seeing some products/things that can not be represented 1 satoshi and that value is 1btc=1,000,000$.
But if it rises more than that, i dont see huge issue since there are not much stuff/products that costs 1c (1satoshi) and likely of crisis resulting from products costing less than 1c/1satoshi is very minimal.
Just my stupid thoughts
The interest i have here is with that much rising potential how to make it more valuable so that anyone holding bitcoin can reap a nice benefit. The way forward seems more need to use bitcoin, increasing its demand, and promoting it to generic public.
Also there is a risk due to volatile nature..due to its small market cap, that negative news affected the bitcoin price tremendously from 1000$ to less than 200$ few years back due to the fact it was involved in underground illegal trading. Looking from now on, I think it was more like a knee-jerk reaction of market, people not realizing that it is not because it is favored currency by criminals, dollar is so far the most favourite currency by criminals. I think we have mostly overcome that stage and several of the dark web page has shut down, yet bitcoin thrived. In fact, I think those events actually helped to make bitcoin more popular by giving my press, albeit in a negative way.
Now what in the future could potentially drive down the price again?
If you see any flaws in my thought process, please let me know and why.
For me, I think the future of Bitcoin will be good, because we all know, Bitcoin is a very popular internet currency now, and there are so many newbie that is interested to know more about bitcoin. It is very succesful right now and in the future it will be more succesful. I just hope bitcoin to be 1,000$ this year :)Just wait for it