Market capitalization. Basically the amount of outstanding shares (bitcoins) multiplied by the value of each share. The current bitcoin market cap is around 10

Market capitalization. Basically the amount of outstanding shares (bitcoins) multiplied by the value of each share. The current bitcoin market cap is around 10 billion USD. The reason why this is not enough is pretty simple; first of all it won't allow you to make BIG payments (if you need to transfer more than 10 billion dollars you can't do that), second of all: no company is going to like having half the total amount of 'money' of the entire economy, it's only useful when everyone has some. If one or a few players control the majority of the bitcoins, nobody else is going to want it. We're not talking about gold which has intrinsic value, we're talking about bits and bytes that only have value because some people agreed that it has value. But it will only have value as long as it's somewhat distributed, if only Satoshi would have had bitcoins, nobody would have been interested.