Global cryptocurrency “market cap” exceeds “US” currency in circulation (opens in new tab)

Nope -- if we're comparing market-caps as priced in dollars, the USD market-cap will always be the number of dollars in circulation.

If we're comparing market-caps in gold bars or cheeseburgers, it is a different story.

Comparing money in circulation, to the value of arbitrary tokens, most of which are held by a few small players, isn't 'comparing a phenom on the same basis'.

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.

The phrasing probably wasn't ideal. I think they meant something different when they said "infinite demand" than what you mean.

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?

This really just seems like an odd statement to me.

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?

"Market cap" is borrowed from equity - the market cap of Apple for instance is determined by the number of shares of Apple outstanding x their price. But those shares have intrinsic value in that they grant you rights to a proportional amount of Apple's cash flow. If you were to destroy 50% of Apple's shares, the remaining half would be worth twice as much since the present value of Apple's cash flows hasn't changed.

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.

There are 4.6 bitcoin transactions per second, how many dollar transaction do you think there are per second and what kind of volume of dollars are traded. Also there are different kinds of dollar in circulation, for example M2 is much higher (by a factor of 10) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL.

A better question to ask is 'why it has meaning'.

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.

Because the value of cryptocurrency is strongly effected by the volume of buy and sell pressure. Market cap implies that a level of liquidity which is likely not present -- it can very difficult to sell large amounts of most crypto without at least temporarily tanking the value.