Dear newbies, are you looking for a promising coin under $1, or even under $0.1? Don’t!

EDIT: read the post before you shill your sub-$1-coins, please, why does nobody do this today?

I always see these posts a lot, but for some reason more in the past few days:

"what are the best coins under $X?"

And sure, it looks like that makes sense – Bitcoin (BTC) is super expensive already, while a coin like BitTorrent (BTT) is available for less than one cent! If you buy some now and they become as expensive as Bitcoin you will be rich! Bitcoin also used to be cheap! Right?

Lol, nah, wrong, obviously. The thing is: coin price doesn't matter. At all. Because it is strongly affected by how many coins are in circulation. There are currently about 18,700,000 BTC in circulation, there will never be more than 21,000,000. But there are 660,000,000,000 BTT at the moment and there will be 990,000,000,000 at some point. The important figure is the market cap, which is

Market Cap = Circulating Supply X Coin Price

So, for example, for BTC it would be 49,500 X 18,700,000, about 920 billion USD. So if we imagine BitTorrent becoming just as big as Bitcoin, how much would a single coin be worth? $1.38. So can't a single BTT be worth thousands of dollars, like BTC is? No, absolutely not. If 1 BTT would be worth 49,500, as 1 BTC currently is, its market cap once all the coins are in circulation would be almost 50,000,000,000,000,000. 50 quadrillion, or 50,000 trillion. The total amount of wealth in the world is about 300 trillion.

tl;dr: Coin price is NOT a good indicator how much a coin can still grow. Check the market cap and compare it to other coins to see how much a coin would need to grow to be as big as another coin. The Coin Perspective is a great website to make these comparisons. Also remember that you can buy fractions of a coin, like 0.001 BTC and don't have to buy a whole one.