It depends on to what extend digital currencies overtake traditional ones. Newegg takes bitcoin. What if bitcoin is fast for everyone, and everyone starts taking it? Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, etc? At least initially for online purchases.
The idea is that bitcoin could become a global currency that renders all the other currencies unnecessary.
Based again on this analysis:
At $47,400, those absurdities of the system will begin to become self evident, not just in relative asset-class value terms but also in total energy-cost terms to support the system. For example, as Zimmermann noted at the end of November,
- As a thought, experiment 21 million Bitcoins at $50,000 each would mean a total market cap of $1 trillion
- The total value of all the world’s coins and banknotes is estimated at $7.6 trillion*
- At $1275 per ounce the total value of all the world’s gold is $7.7 trillion*
- The total value of the world’s money ( Broad Money ) is est. at $90.4 trillion*
In short, once people start having to go without just for the planet to keep maintaining this most excessive and exuberant of luxury asset classes, the obvious absurdity of the creation will cause the bow to break. How that realisation comes about nobody can be sure of at this point. But the two most worrying paths come via an inflationary surge brought on by the hypothetical purchasing power imparted on the global system by all those freshly minted billionaires, or — more likely — via the liquidity constraints which will be imposed upon the rest of the system through having to accommodate bitcoin risk.
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/12...when-bitcoins-market-cap-overtakes-world-gdp/
$22 trillion for BTC would mean it has reached 24% of the current global monetary system. I think that's plausible.
I fully expect crypto currency to represent at least 10-20% of the global financial system within our lifetime. And bitcoin will likely remain the gold standard, accountable for at least 70% of the crypto marketplace (unless it can't keep up, eg. with speed of transfers).
This is just my wild speculation, but there is definitely an appeal to having a global universal currency. I think a lot of people would like that idea and it makes a degree of sense in a global marketplace. Currently everything is standardized to USD. One day that may change.