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by brianobush 2000 days ago
Is there a useful signal in the dollar price? Price of silver? They are all used in hedging bets. Same for BTC, people with a lot of cash are looking for a safe spot while we have the possibility of hyper inflation.
3 comments

The entire BTC market cap is minuscule -- about 600bn as of this writing.

That seems like a lot, but compare it to Apple -- the market cap of just this one company's stock is currently ~2,238bn.

The market cap of gold, US dollars, Euros, etc. are all many times more than Apple. The value of all BTC is a tiny microscopic speck compared to the amount of USD or gold in the world.

This means (among other things) a few small players (with tiny capital relative to, say, the size of all USD) can swing the BTC market either way with a comparatively tiny amount of value moving around.

That would seem to greatly limit BTC's usefulness as any kind of inflation gauge for the broader economy.

To give an another view:

600bn is more than gdp of majority of countries.

For individual humans that’s like saying ”My net worth is $100k and that is more than most people earn in a year”. Yes that is true, it is larger. But it is meaningless comparison and misleading at best.
Correct, and those countries' economies also give us little to no signal about US dollar inflation. The proposition was that BTC prices somehow inform us about that.
Market cap is a stock. GDP is a flow. Comparing the two is nonsense.
GDP is income. What you are doing is the equivalent of comparing your mortgage payment with the price of the house when you bought it.
comparing GDP to market cap is also a very irrelevant kind of comparison. Just because the use the same dimension (like dollar) doesn't mean they are directly comparable.
There is no meaningful threat of hyperinflation in first world economies until China's GDP per capita has reached $20k - $30k and even then there are investment opportunities in India (if they get their corruption under control) or other Asian countries.
Look at the Money Velocity. It’s decreasing. You cannot have hyper inflation with a decreasing velocity.
Hey leopict, strange question... I saw your comment about the PG::Internal Error in the 'Is Apple Silicon Ready' thread but wasn't able to reply there. I've been experiencing the same thing for two weeks and have tried everything. Did you have any luck resolving the issue?
No, it continues to happen in dev env.
Same. By any chance, are you using thoughtbot/parity to restore your dev environment from production?
How much has the velocity of Venezuelan Bolivares increased in the last few years?