Reaching what seems like an astronomical sum of $10 000 USD, Bitcoin is showing no signs of stopping. Many experts are claiming this could be the point at which this bubble bursts. I beg to differ.

The Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market is tiny. It seems like it is huge, right now, if you have been reading up on it and see the buzz happening around it. It's everywhere in the news. This distorts the reality of the situation. Let's look at the math of it all to give us some perspective.

Bitcoin is owned by less than 1% of the global population, according to this source. There are somewhere around 5 million unique cryptocurrency wallet users, according to this article. Let's assume that has gone up considerably since the rapid growth in the past few months. Let's even be generous and assume that each one of those wallets is owned by separate people (they're not - most crypto-users have multiple wallets) and let's assume it has tripled over the last few months. That's around 15 million people. In the world. That puts us around 0.2% of the world owning any Bitcoin.

This visual really serves to illustrate how small Bitcoin is, relatively speaking:

Granted, cryptocurrency has tripled in volume since this chart was made, sitting at around $300 billion now. Sounds really big. Huge, in fact.

It isn't.

That is around 0.1% of the global economy. Not 1%. Zero point one percent.

We are just seeing the tip of iceberg here. The growth potential is massive.

The real bubbles in the market today are, in order of bubbliness: real estate, stocks, and fiat.

Take the example of real estate in North America. In Canada, real estate prices in places like Vancouver and Toronto, for example, are completely out of control, despite numerous attempts by the government to rein in prices. This is a bubble that will burst when people simply can not make payments on their mortgages. Interest rates are slowly climbing and people will get caught with their pants down. It will happen, much like it did in 2008 in the United States.

Student loan debt in the United States is compounding the economy's real estate problems. Student loan debt, along with consumer debt, is mounting to unsustainable heights. As more and more people find their finances crumbling due to staggering debt, the real estate market will get pulled down along with it.

Stocks are nearing a point of an inevitable downswing. It will happen. It hopefully will be a soft landing, but it's coming - and it could be pretty dramatic if a large shift happens in investment from stocks to cryptocurrency. Investors will go where the money is. If the money is in crypto, they will leave stocks and go for the largest return on investment.

Fiat is constantly dwindling in value as it continues to get printed and fractionalized into oblivion. It is, always has been, and always will be, on a downward trajectory in terms of value. This will be exacerbated by the shift in faith from fiat to cryptocurrency.

All of these bubbles will contribute to the further growth of cryptocurrency, not its demise. I have mentioned the example of Zimbabwe before. The Zimbabwean dollar has collapsed in value. It is virtually worthless. Coincidentally, Bitcoin sells in Zimbabwe at a higher price than anywhere else in the world. OK, it's not a coincidence. It's because people are losing faith in a failing currency. This can happen elsewhere, and it will.

So there may well be a Bitcoin bubble coming. There definitely will be corrections. In fact, expect a big dip once Bitcoin hits $10 000 USD as traders take profits. But it has a long, long way to go before this bubble pops.

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*This is not professional trading advice. Do not risk what you can not afford to lose in cryptocurrency (or real estate, or stocks, for that matter!).

sources:
clorstudios.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/iceberg1-2.jpg
static3.businessinsider.com/image/594d0043a3630f1d008b4ed3-915/screen%20shot%202017-06-23%20at%2074804%20am.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin