What people are overlooking is that it's really easy to start a new cryptocurrency. There's no reason why the first mover should remain dominant for ever, or even that there needs to be a single dominant global cryptocurrency for all purposes.

This is only a valid argument if it is hard or too expensive to exchange between first and nth mover.

Because the price of any currency is proportional to GDP/velocity, and since it's costly to exchange cryptocurrency with fiat, there's a limit to how high the velocity can go.

The quantity of money is proportional to nominal GDP/velocity (in the quantity theory of money). This doesn't tell you anything about the "price of a currency" in another currency, ie the exchange rate.

So you're claiming that if Bitcoin did $1 trillion dollars worth of transactions in a year, and people held it for a year on average, that wouldn't necessarily imply a total value for all bitcoins of $1 trillion?

The quantity theory of money is concerned with one currency at a time.

The trick in your paragraph above is that you introduced “$1 trillion dollar”. Of course, if you say that the sum of all transactions (in BTC) has a certain USD value, then you’ve brought the exchange rate in (through the back door).

The total value of all bitcoins could still be $10 trillion or $100 billion.

I'm curious how you think that could actually happen. If the value is $100 billion and it changes hands once per year, then that's $100 billion that changed hands, and the GDP is $100 billion. If it changed hands twice, that's a GDP of $200 billion.

Note that I'm not making a price prediction; I'm just saying that if the price is low, and the velocity isn't unrealistically high, then that necessarily means that Bitcoin is playing a minor role in the economy because it trivially implies a low aggregate value of transactions.

Conversely if the price is high, Bitcoin still might be playing a minor role, if the average velocity is very low because lots of people are holding coins for a long time. But for Bitcoin to play a major role in the economy, it would need either a high price or a high velocity, so the aggregate value of transactions is a major portion of GDP.

A really high velocity would require fast and extremely cheap conversions with fiat, so you can hold fiat and convert to/from bitcoin at transaction time.

> Because the price of any currency is proportional to GDP/velocity

wat

> but it could also exist and do it's job at $1.00 / btc.

Probably one of the stupidest comments I've read on here. You display not even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin or economics work.

If I have a successful company with 100 shares. People will want those shares which will drive the price up. To fix the price at $1.00, or to dilute shares to keep the price at $1.00 is just ridiculous.

Who's saying anything about "fixing" a price or diluting shares?

Bitcoin's exchange rate is a function of supply in demand. It could exist and do its job with low demand (e.g. $1.00 / btc) or high demand (today's price). What is the reason for the high demand? The answer is speculation that the price will continue to rise.

The point I was making is that if people were using it only as a only as a currency, then the price very well could be $1.00 / btc. The reason it's so high is because people in large numbers are buying and holding it as an investment, reducing the supply.