Crypto in its infancy
Having now been around the crypto space for about 18 months, I still feel awed at the rate of change and the pace of things. It is truly exciting times and great to be involved through our project @sportspodium, to have been able to now have TWO events for the community, SteemSaturday 2016 and 2017 where we had @steemit people as key note speakers in South Africa, and also for the last few months as an investor in crypto, trading daily.
The rate of change is indeed amazing, and you can truly make much money, but you can also burn you fingers in this wild west of unregulated investment space. But this is because crypto is really small still. There is so much money that still can flow in. Imagine the prices of tokens if that starts happening!
Market Capitalisation (MC) by coin
Market cap is essentially the value of the organisation calculated by issued shares multiplied by share price. If you buy ALL the shares right at that time at the trading share price, you will own the business 100%. Of course it does not quite work like that ... but you get the idea
In crypto tokens in circulation x token price is market cap. The largest by far is Bitcoin, sitting at around 137 bn USD. That is 56% of the total value of ALL the money in crypto. Ether and Bitcoin cash are a distant 2nd and 3rd at 35bn and 20 bn each. Together the top three make a staggering 79% of all the value in crypto. The top ten coins hold 90% of all the value in crypto.
How does this compare though?
To put this in perspective let us look at some numbers. Total market cap is about $243 bn for all 1300 crypto currencies in issue at this time. One would think this is large, but it is not that much.
There are individuals have significant wealth to rival most coins.
Data source
- Bill Gates - Net worth (market cap) of $86 bn. 1/5th of all crypto, 60% of all BTC and more than double that of no two coin, ETH.
- Warren Buffett - MC of $76 bn
- Jeff Bezos - $73 bn
- Amancio Ortega - $71 bn
- Marc Zuckerberg - $56 bn
- Carlos Slim Helu - $54 bn
- Larry Ellison - $52 bn
- Charles Koch - $48 bn
- David Kock - $48 bn
- Michael Bloomberg - $47 bn.
Any of these top ten, can easily by crypto coin no2, ETH and have heaps of wealth left. It is fair to say they can massively move price and manipulate markets if they wanted to step in.
What about companies?
To put all of this in context, the world's largest company has a market cap of $754 bn, Apple. That is 3.5 times the WHOLE crypto ecosystem. In fact you need to go down to the 16th largest firm by market cap to get to the same numbers as all of crypto together (Industrial & commercial bank of China). To get to the same market cap of BTC, you need to go down to 51st place, Altria Group Inc. So if BTC was listed on a stock exchange it will not be a top 50 company. Ether does not make the top 100 by a large margin.
All of this shows how much scope there is for this fascinating world of crypto, but without strong market cap, this can be easily hijacked by big fiat money plays. And it does happen. If you through $50m USD into a market, it creates all kinds of havoc. And there are many people that can do that without blinking, most of them outside the crypto world.
Bitcoin Royalty
Even with Satoshi purportedly having mined a million BTC, at current prices it still is only about 8bn, and way of the world's richest list. And he is by far the wealthiest if the rumours are true. The Winklevoss twins at abou $240m, Barry Silbert at $280m etc are all very wealthy for sure. But not yet close to the mega rich. Crypto has a way to go, and while this may be the future, we are not yet in that space where significant part of the worlds wealth is flowing here.
The top ten wallets in BTC owns 5% of it Source. While not sure if there is one person owning more than wallet, it is clear that there is some spectacular wealth, and if BTC does go to 100 000, the worlds richest list is about to change, but for now, it is still a long journey.