When I first wrote this post, I didn’t know what the final number of Tezos “tezzies” was going to be, and made a guesstimage. The total number has been published:
763,306,929.69
Of course, I was off by quite a bit – more than 200 million of them. However, it’s worth noting that while that’s going to be the total number, the genesis block number will actually be a little north of 600 million (607 million and change) so I was only off by about ten percent or so, which isn’t too bad all things considered.
There’s another aspect of this though, and that’s the respective market caps against which I compared the potential future Tezos price. At the time (only four months ago!) Bitcoin had a $40 billion market cap – that is now $124 billion. Ethereum was at about $20 billion, and is now $45 billion. Dash has grown five times and is now at $5 billion, and Ripple is at $9 billion.
So, if we do those calculations on the total:
BTC: $124 billion / 763,306,929.69 ~~ $162.45 per tezzie
ETH: $45 billion / 763,306,929.69 ~~ $58.95 per tezzie
XRP: $9 billion / 763,306,929.69 ~~ $11.79 per tezzie
DASH: $5 billion / 763,306,929.69 ~~ $6.55 per tezzie
If we use the genesis block number:
BTC: $124 billion / 607,489,040.89 ~~ $204.12 per tezzie
ETH: $45 billion / 607,489,040.89 ~~ $74.06 per tezzie
XRP: $9 billion / 607,489,040.89 ~~ $14.82 per tezzie
DASH: $5 billion / 607,489,040.89 ~~ $8.23 per tezzie
In each case I used the straight up number (5 billion = 5,000,000,000) for the calculations, which isn’t representative of the actual market cap. Also, I rounded UP to the nearest cent. However, as the market caps are likely to continue to change, and this is all just guesstimates anyway, it’s neither here nor there if I use the actual market cap or not. Also, the genesis block number will be more accurate at least initially, though there are of course inflationary issues I’m not considering here, as well as the “unlocking” of the vested locked coins at 20% per year.
So where does this leave us?
With a working alphanet (for the most part – see www.tezos.id), and still with the backing of some very large figures (e.g., Tim Draper) there are a lot of people who don’t want to see this fail. While there’s been some high profile bad news (i.e., the class action lawsuits) there’s good updates now coming from the team (see @arthurb and @breitwoman on Twitter) and it seems progress is being made.
The future price of a tezzie? I’d say that my initial estimates are probably still accurate, even based off the incorrect initial estimate of the number involved. Each tezzie sells for around $2 on HitBTC.com right now (a 400% return on the ICO price of about $0.40, if you could sell them), so I’d say we’d be looking at around the $12 – $13 range or so initially.