CNN Money: A $50,000 Bitcoin?

Could Bitcoin actually be worth around $50,000? A story on CNN Money by Fortune‘s David Z. Morris suggests that this might not be too far off. Speaking with Susan Athey, professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Morris notes that Bitcoin is only a few steps away from having that valuation.

Morris explains:

If Amazon.com (AMZN) adopted bitcoin for all payments, its volume of $38 billion, divided by a supply of (at the time of the email’s writing) about 7 million bitcoin, would make each bitcoin worth $5,400. If $300 billion in international remittance was conducted in bitcoin, that volume alone would push the price to $42,000. Adding these, along with online poker and gas station transactions, would lead to a total transaction volume of $602 billion — and a bitcoin, even at today’s expanded supply of 12 million coins, worth $50,000.”

Athey argues that the $50,000 value isn’t a bad place to establish a “maximum” price for Bitcoin as it currently exists, but notes that a variety of technological, economic and practical issues would need to be resolved before that number could be seen as viable. And with so many variables, such as competing cryptocurrency systems and unknown developments in the future of online finance, that there’s really no way to predict Bitcoin’s future value, if any. “There’s a big probability that there’s a zero market share for Vitcoin,” she explains.

Morris does note that Bitcoin currently has one massive advantage over traditional online transactions.

Online retailers’ razor-thin profit margins get a huge boost when they pay a Bitcoin processor’s fee of about 1% instead of credit card fees of 2-3%. How long will it be, some ask, before a major retailer offers a discount for those paying in Bitcoin, as a way to maximize that increased profit margin? Such a discount could drive significant Bitcoin adoption in a very short timeframe.