The marketcap of the entire crypto market is a complete and total lie and I'll explain to you why. First let's begin with why the marketcap of bitcoin itself is completely inaccurate, and just as a reminder, marketcap is a simple calculation of circulating supply multiplied by the spot price.

Firstly, you can remove 1 million BTC from the circulating supply right off the top, which is the Satoshi wallet which can never be touched or it will crash the entire market just on the news that it's active. Then, there is an indeterminate number that is very likely very large of coins that were mined very early on in very large numbers and lost forever in wallets that will never be recovered. There are likely at least a couple of million BTC in dead wallets mined by people in the CPU and early GPU days as a novelty that they forgot about or lost for whatever reason. We can probably safely assume that at least 3 million and perhaps upward of 5 to 6 million BTC are lost and irrecoverable for whatever reason. Now again, marketcap is calculated by circulating supply multiplied by the spotprice.

This presents a problem because BTC has never once in it's life actually been subjected to an organic level of price discovery, it's always been heavily manipulated during a time when the majority of the value of BTC was from mined coins that had never once touched fiat. You might recall the recent MIT study that showed that the price run up from $100 to $2000 was orchestrated by a single individual doing wash trades with himself. The point here is that the current spotprice of BTC is not AT ALL reflective of a fair market evaluation of it's price as a utility, but merely as a speculative instrument and thus the "market cap" is completely and utterly false because any significant movement of BTC volume into fiat will have a disproportionate effect on the "market cap" of the coin, since the order books are far, far, far thinner than anyone actually realizes due to the effects I've enumerated above about the circulating supply and actual volume of coins exposed to fiat being exceptionally lower than anyone generally realizes or acknowledges.

Now on to the alt market...

All of the alts with the exception of Ethereum and to a lesser extent Litecoin are merely doublings of the fiat value of their respective fiat on ramps. However, even Ethereum was only obtainable by purchasing with BTC or mining it for a significant period during early adoption, giving us another example of a thin market that has never actually seen any significant organic price discovery of the underlying asset's utility value. So, we can safely estimate roughly 50%-60% of the circulating supply of ETH has never touched fiat, and upwards of 95%+ of alts have never touched fiat whatsoever. Thus, at the very least, 70%-80% of the alt market DOES NOT represent an actual influx of fiat into the market, but a mere artificial doubling of the fiat price of the fiat onramps used to purchase those coins. Meaning, when you buy BTC to buy an alt, fiat value goes into the market raising the "market cap" of BTC, but when you purchase your alt with BTC, the marketcap of BTC doesn't go down to represent a transference of fiat value to that alt, it merely pumps the "market cap" of that alt, artificially doubling the "market cap" of the entire crypto market.

So, are we in a bubble? Well, I would say no we're not, because this market is absurdly thin compared to the perception of it's value due to the effects described above. The reason this market is so insanely volatile, and the reason there is such a stark crash from such a sharp peak, is that there is in reality likely a mere $60 to $120 billion of actual fiat in the ENTIRE crypto market, and perhaps even less than that depending on the actual circulating supply of BTC, and especially the circulating supply that's actually feasibly exposable to exchanges, even assuming the owner still has access to the wallet.

It's quite obvious to me that the marketcap of the entire crypto space is an absurd illusion, and that even 10 years on we haven't even seen a minuscule fraction of a percent of the adoption potential of this technology in the public space. Even at the height of the peak when shills on MSNBC and CNBC were pumping BTC with FOMO sermons, we probably never exceeded even 200 billion in actual market capitalization worldwide, at the very best.

The overall point here is that the public awareness and adoption of blockchain technology, and the real fiat value of the entire crytpo market is ABSURDLY lower than anyone generally realizes or acknowledges. Assuming that alts in the top 50 or even the top 10 "have no room to grow" because of their "market caps" is completely asinine. Most notably, thinking that we've even BEGUN to enter into the institutional money phase when the actual MC of the entire crypto space is probably no larger than $120 billion at best is also completely foolish and ignorant.