- Market cap is sort of a misleading stat. Microsoft's market cap is ~1.75 trillion, but it's p/e ratio is 34. So if they stopped reinvesting in their business, I'd be making 3% yearly on that investment with a hedge against inflation since they can just raise prices. A lot more goes into their valuation than that, but my point is that even if you are a huge skeptic of Microsoft's current valuation, the company is still worth a ton of money. I don't have a number, but I'd imagine that at $500 billion, pretty much every investor on the planet would think that Microsoft is a crazy steal. On the other hand, bitcoin's value is based on perception of its value and nothing else. The fact that some people are willing to buy in at $50k doesn't mean that every investor on the planet would think that bitcoin is a steal at 10k. There'd still be plenty of people who consider that price to be way to high as well. Since market cap is determined entirely by people willing to pay the most, it's hard to say what market cap means for something like bitcoin.
- I agree that there comes a point in time where even a skeptic has to give in. BTC really started to explode about 3 years ago. For me, that's just not enough time. Subjectively, after 10 years at reasonably high values, I'd probably have to reconsider, assuming it gets less volatile over time.
- The volatility is the main concern for me. Gold had a low around 100 and a high close to 200 in the past year of craziness, so it almost doubled. BTC went up about 10x from it's 2020 low to its recent high. Even Zoom and Peloton are only up ~4x from a year ago and this pandemic has fundamentally changed their businesses. I think if BTC got to a point where it didn't change more than 25% value in a year with a normal-ish economy, I'd have to reevaluate.
But Bitcoin seems to have no use case, and it takes more and more energy as the price goes up.
The higher price absent any use case or advantage seems like it only has speculative value. It could become a religious thing where it has value because people value it: a lot of gold’s value exists for this same reason.
But I’ll wait to see how things play out with Tether before thinking that is likely. They are under pretty severe reporting requirements for the next two years and if they can’t show reserves for the $30 billion they printed last year they are in trouble.
I'm overall "just fine" with Ethereum though. There's a lot of speculation going on, but it's also a rather productive idea that I hope takes off in the future.
I'm a fan of cryptocurrency in general, just not really Bitcoin.
edit: Thinking about your question though, maybe it could be interpreted as "if the market cap/price of BTC was more stable, would you like it?" and the answer to that is yes, however still I don't believe that it provides much utility compared to other cryptocurrencies.
