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Re:Cryptoeconomics: Paving the Future of Blockchain Technology by PeterisP on Saturday July 22, 2017 @08:46PM (#14830288)
The current market cap is not appropriate for the current usage of bitcoin - it's like a startup valuation that "prices in" the assumption that the usage will massively increase.

Thus any limitations that would prevent a large growth in adoption would also destroy most of the existing/stored value, since whenever "the market" would believe that the usage growth is going to stop, the price and the market capitalization would drastically decrease.

Re:Cryptoeconomics: Paving the Future of Blockchain Technology by guscost on Saturday July 22, 2017 @09:09PM (#14830376)
> whenever "the market" would believe that the usage growth is going to stop

If you're talking about transactions-per-second, how could the market not already know that this is the case? Computers have finite resources, and a decentralized immutable proof-of-work ledger would be really inefficient to run on ten billion devices forever.

But if you mean growth in total perceived value, Bitcoin's use as a trust-less standard for floating other currencies could continue indefinitely. I'm not able to talk seriously about the proof-of-work/proof-of-stake argument, or the inflation/deflation argument, but there's no known technical reason that each Bitcoin can't be worth a trillion dollars in the far future. In addition to the economic and political theory, you're basically betting that asymmetric crypto, SHA, and the Bitcoin source are all mathematically sound, and probably that physics imposes serious limits on computing power, if you want to make that (super) long play.