The coin’s price is just a number, so investors should focus on why it has value.
A single desert spring can green an entire valley, but when the basin dries and the crowd grows, the scramble to secure what’s precious inevitably intensifies. Today’s financial system feels like that basin on its worst day, with many actors seeking a path to wealth, but with a dwindling pool of hard assets that can’t simply be conjured by a government printing press or anything else.
Enter Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), a cryptocurrency that has never changed its monetary policy once. While the world’s money supply keeps growing, Bitcoin’s decelerating supply growth is cemented in cryptographic code.
With that in mind, I predict that $1 million per coin is no longer a fringe fantasy so much as an inevitability. Bitcoin could even hit that target sooner than anticipated if things continue as they have been. Here’s why.
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, and roughly 94% of them already exist. The pool is even smaller once you subtract an estimated 3.7 million coins that are lost forever due to misplaced keys or provably unspendable coins that have been intentionally burned by owners.
Fresh supply keeps shrinking, and it will only continue to do so. Bitcoin can’t experience supply growth in the way that fiat currency does.
After the April 2024 halving, only 478 new coins are mined daily. Meanwhile, spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have been pulling in more than $150 million of net inflows on an average day this year, even after a recent slowdown.
In other words, demand from just one distribution channel outpaces all newly mined supply by roughly 5 to 1. That’s part of the reason some commentators describe the coin as digital gold.
Scarcity alone does not imply that buyers will actually bid more to secure the asset, but it does anchor the bullish math quite strongly. With perhaps 17 million to 18 million coins actually accessible of the total supply, hitting $1 million implies a $17 trillion market cap, which is about the size of today’s existing gold stock. The precedent of an asset reaching that size is thus already well established.
When the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, it opened the gate for every retirement planner and pension fund to invest in the coin with a few clicks.
