I had to look up what came after a trillion. This is how big the market cap for crypto will eventually become. We've been hovering around a third of a trillion dollars for a while now, so I'm making the claim that we are going x3000. This probably sounds absolutely ridiculous to you. Just look at the Google searches:
The global yearly incomes of everyone added up only equal 70 trillion a year. The combined wealth of humanity is only $241 trillion. How could the crypto market cap possibly make it to a quadrillion?
The market cap is a flawed measure of value.
First of all, people put way too much stock in what the market cap actually symbolizes. The market cap assumes that if you could liquidate ALL the crypto at the current price you'd be left with a pile of money as big as the market cap. This is an absolutely absurd measurement. It literally can't happen. As holdings get sold off the price goes down, thus lowering the cap. At best, you could liquidate a crypto for half of the market cap. At worst, the value would plummet to zero immediately.
If everyone decides that Bitcoin is worth nothing tomorrow everyone will try to cut their losses and sell. If everyone sells at the same time and there are no buyers the price will go to zero immediately. As you can see, Bitcoin's $127,660,487,561 market cap means nothing. In the highly unlikely scenario above, Bitcoin could be liquidated for less than a million dollars.
The converse is also true. If everyone decides to hold their coins and refuses to sell, no matter how high the price action goes, the market cap will skyrocket without actually having very much fiat been put in.
The market cap also assumes that EVERY coin can be liquidated. Satoshi Nakamoto hasn't touched his 10% premined coins and I doubt he ever will. Thousands of Bitcoins have been permanently lost. Imagine if all Bitcoins got lost except one. The value of that one Bitcoin would be a hundred million dollars, but the market cap would assume no coins were lost and would spike to 1.7 Quadrillion.
With this information, one can see that the market cap is only loosely linked to the fiat currency used to buy it. Once more goods and services can be bought and sold with crypto directly, the correlation between blockchain and fiat will become more and more separated. It will eventually become obvious that fiat currency is an old relic of the past; a currency that required the community that used it to trust an oligarchy that controlled it. We are entering a trustless industrial revolution where artificial scarcity will become a thing of the past.
Everyone is in competition (artificial scarcity)
What percentage of effectiveness is humanity operating at right now? In other words, if the entire world was working together in harmony, how much worse are we than that? I like to throw out the number 1%. I think that technology and production would increase 100 fold without the friction of competition and greed. Technology and production are already increasing at an exponential rate. With a lot more cooperative organization we could advance even faster.
As it stands right now, the establishment capitalizes on artificial scarcity. Corporations clamp down on patents and intellectual property so that no one else can make a profit but them. They then set the price and the supply based on demand. They try to manipulate the system to the fullest to make the highest profit. Greed is a predictable beast. Just look at how much money they charge for cancer medication. It's no surprise that conspiracy theorists think that cancer has already been cured, but that cure got swept under the rug for profits.
Humanity has enslaved itself with a system founded on greed. Even billionaires are enslaved. Sure they can do anything they want, but they can only do anything they want within the broken system that they've created; this Empire of Dirt. The paradigm shift that blockchain tech brings is a win-win for everybody on the planet.
Now that blockchain is here to stay, that mythical cooperative organization idealists talk about can actually become a reality. The rules for currency creation and distribution are being determined directly by the communities using them. This will become the foundation for everything that community does. The blockchain is the foundation of an open source cooperative economy.
The Evolution of Government and Law
Blockchain tech isn't just going to decentralize money. It's going to decentralize everything. This includes government, which is arguably the most important piece of society that requires a purge of corruption.
Government is highly susceptible to centralization, and in turn, corruption. Corporations hire lobbyists and pay huge sums of money to draft laws in their favor. Government is a slow lumbering beast. It's very easy to identify the weak points and exploit them because change happens so slowly. Blockchain governments will solve that problem in a big way.
Communities founded on the ideals of blockchain governance are going to be much faster to act than their centralized counterparts. When someone finds a hole in the system, that hole will be plugged instead of made bigger. The evolution of the blockchain travels at a speed that no traditional institution could possibly hope to keep up with.
"But, it's fake money that's popping out of thin air."
You hear this argument a lot from people who have no idea what they are talking about. Fiat currency is the currency that is popping out of thin air. No one can create crypto out of thin air without actively attacking the network. Every crypto has its own rules for generating inflation and dispersing it. Fiat currencies come up with their own rules behind closed doors.
The value backing up crypto is that it's clearly a superior system. It can't rationally be looked at as money being created out of thin air when you understand the tech behind it. This is why the market cap of crypto is bound to hit the quadrillion dollar mark (that and the dollar is going to eventually crash and burn to zero value).
Production and technology grow at an exponential rate while wages stay linear. Automation is eliminating middle-class jobs. The division between the rich and the poor is at an all time high. Greed runs rampant across the planet and we are all bound by invisible chains forged by artificial scarcity. This unsustainable economy will eventually implode. It's clear that a major paradigm shift is required to mitigate the damages that have been done. I used to think that everything was going to crash and burn in a very apocalyptic manner, but now the blockchain offers us a faint glimmer of hope for a reasonable transition.
The Age of Abundance is upon us. I'm not saying you need to invest in crypto. I'm saying, when the time comes, everyone on the planet is going to be taken care of regardless of what you decide to do. Money is a measure of resources. E = MC². Energy = Matter. Once technology advances far enough, resources become infinite due to the power of the sun and cold fusion. It's not a stretch to say that crypto will hit a Quadrillion dollar market cap. It is inevitable, likely in our lifetime.