In order to put into perspective what Bitcoin represents amongst all of the world’s money, Howmuch has produced a visualization full of insights.
Since 2009, Bitcoin has made a long road and has overcome many obstacles on its journey. The Bitcoin price has grown exponentially, and its market cap is at the time of writing over $41 bln, which is the same net worth of Google’s co-founder, Larry Page.
Bill Gates, the richest man on earth with a net worth of $86 bln, has approximately the net worth of Larry Page and Bitcoin combined.
Bitcoin equals Morocco
“Bitcoin is the Uber of cryptocurrencies: the biggest, baddest and best-known, but not the only one. Add it up to Litecoin, Monero and all the others, and the total volume of virtual money floating around the Internet, out of the reach of governments and banks, is a whopping $100 bln. That is about as much as the current GDP of Morocco the 60th-largest economy in the world,” notes Raul Amoros.
Nowadays, tech companies are more than ever before dominating the stock market. The monetary value of giants like Amazon ($402 bln) and (Apple $730 bln) is equivalent to the GDP of much bigger economies like Nigeria and the Netherlands, respectively. Apple’s monetary value is 18 folds the Bitcoin market capitalization.
"Moving to upper scales, the amount of actual money in dollar notes and coins in circulation around the world is $1.5 tln. Amounting to 36 folds the market capitalization of Bitcoin."
Apart from fiduciary money, gold has played a significant role in the money game due to its scarcity and marketability. Gold was still the basis of money in the 1960s, in an unbroken line stretching back to the beginnings of history. Today, the latest figure for all the gold in the world is 171,300 tonnes, which is currently priced at $8.2 tln: 200 folds the Bitcoin’s market cap.
More on the left, the visualization shows that the sum of “narrow money” is $31 tln. Narrow money is a category of the money supply that includes all physical money like coins and currency, along with other liquid assets held by the central bank. This is 750 times the market cap of Bitcoin.
As for “broad money,” which is the totality of assets that households and businesses can easily convert into cash or use to make payments, it totals $83 tln. This represents 2,000 times the market cap of Bitcoin, but also 2.5 times the total sum of narrow money. It is only obvious that our current system will crash if everybody attempts to withdraw money that is supposed to be “easily” convertible into cash, while the stock of physical money is insufficient to cover such withdrawals.
“If the see-sawing rise of Bitcoin tells us anything, it is that people are losing their trust in money, and other traditional measures of wealth,” concludes Raul Amoros. “Let's talk again when the total value of all cryptocurrencies surpasses that of the world's supply of gold…”