4 ms·

Bitcoin's "market cap" is completely imaginary.

• loblollyboy 7y ago
  There are companies offering completely useless software 'solutions' that don't even do their useless task well and many of them have stock prices that have grown 100% + since the bailouts, even if they haven't updated their technology since before then. How is the value of BTC more fake than that?
  • papln 7y ago
    The difference is that if management of the average publicly traded stock shopped it around, they could probably find a buyer for 50% or more of current market cap. Maybe not for the biggest companies like Amazon and Apple. If a substantial fraction of BTC owners tried to exit, they'd have more trouble getting close to nominal value.
    • Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
      For something like this a metric known as enterprise value is used. Assets - cash + debt AKA the takeover price. You can find these numbers on the company's balance sheet. The average company is traded at something like 3.5x their book value (Assets - debt). The market value of a company is likewise some multiple of their EV.
    • DagAgren 7y ago
      That is understating the situation quite a bit. Volume is so non-existent that basically any attempt at exiting at all would crater the price.