$100,000,000 - Plenty to go around for
everyone. Fits nicely on an ISO / Military
standard sized pallet.

$1 Million is the cash square on the floor.

$1,000,000,000 - This is how a billion dollars looks like.
10 pallets of $100 bills.

$1,000,000,000,000 - When they throw around the word "Trillion" like it is nothing, this is the reality of $1 trillion dollars. The square of pallets to the right is $10 billion dollars. 100x that and you have the tower of $1 trillion that is 465 feet tall (142 meters).

Bitcoin is an independent digital currency (just as digital as the money numbers in your bank account). The difference is that YOU have the control over this number, not the banks. Bitcoin is NOT controlled by any government or any bank. It works on the same idea as BitTorrent, but instead of broadcasting files, transactions are broadcast to thousands of servers that check on each other to make sure the transactions are valid by means of advanced cryptographic algorithms. You also can run a Bitcoin node/server at your home.

Bitcoin has become the fastest appreciating asset in human history. In November 2013 for a brief time, each Bitcoin was worth over a $1000 dollars, in contrast to 2010, when the first Bitcoin transaction recorded was for two Pizzas at a price of 10,000 Bitcoins. Bitcoin's value has been extremely volatile since it's inception.
5% price fluctuations are very common, sometimes multiple times a day.

Bitcoins can be bought or created. Creating Bitcoins requires a computer to calculate and solve for a key, that releases the Bitcoins. At first it was easy and anyone could create Bitcoins on a regular home computer, but the Bitcoin ecosystem automatically adjusts so only 12.5 Bitcoins (12.5 for now) are released every 10 minutes systemwide, no matter how many computers are solving for the key. Today to make any serious money on mining Bitcoins, it requires specially designed one-purpose computers/servers in huge arrays, like shown in visualization above.

Why Bitcoin? Bitcoin can not be created out of thin air, unlike Dollars and Euros. Bitcoin follows the laws of thermodynamics- Bitcoin requires input (computer tech investment and electricity) to create/mine Bitcoins, just like Gold requires equipment and fuel for mining/extraction. Bitcoin is finite, with only 21 million coins that will ever be created. Bitcoin is deflationary versus Dollars and Euros that are inflationary. You have total control of your funds,you can transfer it globally near instantaneous speed with immutability- something neither Dollar, Gold or any other storage of wealth can offer. Long term outlook for Bitcoin is that it might do to Money what the Internet did to Communication.

Potential Risks: Bitcoin was created by the mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym), the identity of the creator is still argued to this day.
First there were fears Bitcoin's code can be cracked and the system can be destroyed, but 8 years later, such fears have subsided and price has rocketed. Now other roadblocks face Bitcoin, such as scalability- Bitcoin has a theoretical limit of 10 transactions/second, while Visa/Mastercard does ~2000/second. Scalability has turned into a heavy long debate because NO single person can "upgrade" Bitcoin, there must be a system-wide consensus. While in the past getting consensus has worked well, with this specific scalability issue the global Bitcoin community has failed to agree for some time now.

There are now many Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, still Bitcoin is most dominant. Bitcoin created an idea, but competing crypto currencies with better implementations could possibly overtake Bitcoin in the future, just like Facebook overtook MySpace.

Bill Gates, Carlos Slim and Warren Buffett are the richest people in the world, this is how their fortunes stack up in $100 bills.

Bill Gates and Warren are US citizens. Carlos Slim is a Mexican citizen, being a successful investor throughout his life, Carlos now runs multiple monopolies in Mexico.

If Bill Gates and Warren Buffet (US Citizens) both donated all their money to the US Government (at pay.gov) their collective wealth of 145.9 Billion would fund the US Government for 13 Days, 7 Hours, 31 Minutes and 17 Seconds, or if all paid in lump sum. Bill and Warren together could decrease the US Debt by 0.7 percent.

If you are one of the so called "rich" and you were lucky enough to make a million dollars per year, it would take you almost 80,000 YEARS to catch up to Warren!

Data time: Dec 2014.

This shows the estimated value of the world's largest companies.

The value shown is their stock's "Market Capitalization", which is calculated as share price multiplied by total number of shares. This number actually is abstract estimation of value and fluctuates greatly with bad or good news published on a company. It is not uncommon for a 10% move in Stock Prices and Market Cap. This means these towers of cash can sometimes fluctuate in height of 5-10 floors per day. Still the Market Cap is a rough sense of their size and perceived value.

Demonocacy.info has dedicated articles for all the Gold and all the Silver in the World.

This is short summary of the relatively small amount of gold and silver available in the world for investment purposes.

The approximate value of all investment Gold in the World is $2.5 Trillion USD
at $40/gram or $1250/ounce.

There is significantly more silver in the world than gold, but because silver is multiples cheaper than gold (less than $20/oz in 2017), a lot of silver has gotten lost throughout time. Silver is also used in industrial production. The amount of investment silver available to the public is a surprisingly small amount. World governments do not hold any significant silver reserves, unlike with gold.

Data Source: Silver Institute & World Gold Council

This is how much money is on the planet. It is not all in physical cash though (as shown above), most of it is digital:

Base Money consists of money held by banks (received from their Central Banks when Banks sold Government or Corporate bonds to their Central Banks, the money is available for lending to the private sector), money stored in bank's vaults (physical cash) and cash in people's hands. This money is not available at the ATM.

Bank Money consists of money stored in banks by corporations and people, available for withdrawal at any time.
Bank Money is also lent out by Banks to people and business'. Banks have a minimum reserve requirement (usually 10%) that they must keep on hand. If everyone decided to go to the ATM and pull everything, there would be a run on the bank.

Here we are: The Final: All the money and all the assets in the world, shown in physical cash form, in one graphic.

The Liquidity Pyramid was created for visualizing the organization of asset classes in terms of risk and size. The Liquidity Pyramid was created during the time in United States, when each dollar was backed by Gold. Gold forms the small base of most reliable value, and asset classes on progressively higher levels are more risky. The larger size of asset classes at higher levels is representative of the higher total worldwide notional value of those assets. While Exter's original pyramid placed Third World debt at the top, today derivatives hold this dubious honor.

As financial risk increases, money tends to move from the more risky assets (Derivatives),
to the least risky assets (to physical cash and then gold). Nothing is without risk, but risk is relative.
The issue is that there is very little physical cash and even less Gold compared to
the more risky assets, this makes for a crowded trade in times of high risk
when everyone wants to jump into cash and gold, pushing up the price.

The little yellow rectangle on the left front is all the gold in the world in physical form. All the gold in the world is NOT all in "financial investment grade" form.
World Trade Center, Empire State & bunch of too-big-to-fail Bank HQ buildings are in the background to help illustrate the size. You are eye-level to the WTC top floors.
The $1 Quadrillion Derivatives cash wall fades into the distance, because $1 Quadrillion is an estimation by the best analysts and truth is no one really knows the true size of the Derivatives Market.

Click on the image above for a 75 megapixel, giant resolution zoom-in eye candy bonanza!
After zooming, if you look carefully, you will be able to see a small man standing on top of the gold pillar.

Read more about Exter's Pyramid here and here.
Infographic Data Source: Download Here | Additonal Sources