> a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only requires the energy of a "small city."
It only sounds good because we haven't really considered the scale here, so let's scale that up a bit.
What if even 1% of non cash financial transactions in the US were handled with BTC? For 2015, that would have worked out to about $1.8T.
How big would BTC need to be to handle that? Well, it looks like last year it's estimated to have done a little over $100B, so it'd have to scale somewhere around 15-20x to even cover 1% of one country's transactions...
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-p...
[2]https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?...