The entire FX market is that reality.
The reporting and liquidity of crypto assets has become impressive and will continue to improve. I think the most useful thing would be for you to make a note of what standard or threshold you would use to find crypto growth to be impressive, make sure that standard is a standard that matches other asset classes you respect instead of a fictional higher standard exclusively for crypto, and then watch for crypto to meet those standards as it matures. You can even help improve it.
If we're comparing market-caps in gold bars or cheeseburgers, it is a different story.
Since cryptos are not a currency, and have no backing either in the form of some other financial instrument (i.e. Government Bonds) or Real Estate, it's hard to compare to other things.
no... infinite demand would make market cap infinite also...
I think what they mean is that it assumes that the demand curve, uh, I guess goes off to infinity (or just, some extremely large number which can be practically modeled as "infinity") near the current price,
meaning, that you could sell arbitrarily large amounts of it without substantially decreasing the price that people are willing to pay for it.
Which, yeah, that assumption seems false in practically relevant ways. If you sell a whole lot of [cryptotoken X], the price is likely to go down?
Given that crypto-assets do not have a physical form, why compare on this basis?
Well, that's obvious. If you look at a more-comparable monetary stock measures (say, M2, which includes dollars in checking, savings, small time-deposits and liquid money market funds) you find that the U.S. dollar number is more like $20tn and it looks a lot less exciting.
Let's also ignore the fact that the "market cap" of a crypto-asset in U.S. dollar terms is not a cash equivalent because, and let me go out on a limb here, if you tried to find a buyer for every bitcoin in circulation your VWAP would not be the current spot price.
Coins: 7003
Exchanges: 459
Market Cap: $2,395,873,664,914
24h Vol: $221,081,504,173
Dominance: BTC 45.1% ETH 16.0% ETH Gas : 122 gwei
TLDR:
Dollars: $2,154,870,000,000
Crypto: $2,395,873,664,914
The market cap of just the S&P 500, which is denominated in U.S. dollars, is over $30tn, which is 50% more than the M2 money supply of U.S. dollars.
So, explain to me again how these things should meaningfully be compared?
That is, US currency circulates, and crypto currency doesn't.
Assets and currencies don't have market caps in any sense. Take a look back pre-Bitcoin and there are basically no references to the "market cap of Gold" or any such thing, they've all arisen due to the comparisons to Bitcoin. There's no intrinsic or underlying value, prices are purely trade driven. This doesn't make them "bad" per se, just completely different than something like Market Cap can capture.
As one other point for Bitcoin specifically, basically nobody knows how many Bitcoin are actually in circulation. There are a million+ lost / inactive. If someone moved a single BTC out of Satoshi's wallet, the price would very likely collapse nearly instantaneously. So how can a "market cap" be treated seriously if a single "share" trading hands at current market prices would collapse it. Bezos sells over $1 Billion of Amazon stock per year to no impact on AMZN.
Money supply has meaning because it's money in circulation.
If I print 1000 'Buddy Dollars' and sell one to a friend for $1000, it doesn't really mean that I have $1M in Buddy Dollars.
It might be helpful to compare the amount of USD spent on goods and services vs. the amount of Crypto spent on goods and services.
I wonder if there is a similar number for US paper currency?