You’ll know Bitcoin has won when it’s suddenly boring
Onboarding the world to Bitcoin takes a series of firsts
Sittipong Phokawattana/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Last week, we covered a story that might’ve made you feel impossibly late to Bitcoin.
Let’s undo that feeling.
I’m not here to make the case that nation states and multibillion-dollar companies buying bitcoin is not a big deal.
El Salvador adopting BTC as legal tender will go down in history as one of the most significant events in finance, modern or otherwise, regardless of how it ended. Bhutan’s harnessing of its bountiful hydropower capacity to mine bitcoin is equally momentous.
So is Michael Saylor and (Micro)Strategy’s toppling of the first corporate domino, when it bought $250 million bitcoin in 2020. Square (now Block) and Tesla quickly followed, then a few firms across Asia, and then a few more in the US. Now, companies are announcing new treasury strategies every other day.
Almost half a decade later, one portal counts 74 public stocks with at least some bitcoin on their balance sheets, totaling 764,070 BTC ($86.1 billion), or almost 4% of the circulating supply. (Strategy makes up over three quarters of the whole.)
And then there’s the two-and-a-half dozen ETFs and other funds with 1.39 million BTC ($148.7 billion), or over 6.6% of the coins in existence, most of it belonging to BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale.
Obviously, the price of bitcoin has jumped alongside each leap of adoption in the past five years: major corporations, sovereigns, asset managers and then back to corporations of all sizes, including SPACs.
Bitcoin is up almost 10x since Strategy’s first buy, 3x since Nayib Bukele announced the Bitcoin Law, and nearly 2.5x since the SEC approved ETFs for trading.
MetaPlanet has only 1.5% of Strategy’s stash, but the impact is still clear.
At this point, and however unintuitive, the supply of bitcoin could be more decentralized than it has ever been, even if more of it is owned by centralized entities than ever before.
Wasn’t this meant to make you feel early to Bitcoin?
There are plenty of reasons to be confident about the price of bitcoin. I’ll leave it to others to amplify them, but if your yardstick for “earliness” is based on your entry point to BTC, then I’m afraid it’s all relative. You’re always earlier than some but later than others.
Here’s an alternative view: We’re all early to Bitcoin until the novelty wears off.
First, it was crime. The media loved crypto crime stories — because these soaked up traffic. But on a long enough timeline, all crime will be “crypto crime,” and related headlines have been passé for years already.
News of corporate bitcoin treasuries is destined to go the same way. As will word of sovereign funds, governments, altcoins and pensions buying bitcoin. Maybe religious institutions will come next, or Ivy League universities. Record labels and movie studios, public and private. Elementary schools and mom and pops.
As Bitcoin eats the world, each wave of adoption will feel like a novelty, until it isn’t. Only then will I happily agree that we’re no longer early.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
