Will Bitcoin Hit $1M in Decade? Bitwise Weighs the Odds

It is a number that sounds absurd to casual observers and even to seasoned financial advisors. Reaching that milestone would require the leading cryptocurrency to surge roughly 14x from its current valuation. 

However, according to Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management, the math behind a seven-figure Bitcoin is actually grounded in a set of “reasonably conservative assumptions.”

Hougan believes that those who dismiss a $1 million price target are making a fundamental mathematical error: they are using static math to analyze a rapidly moving market.

A static denominator

If one assumes that the store-of-value market will remain exactly the same size forever, getting Bitcoin to $1 million is a near-impossible task. At today’s market size, Bitcoin would need to capture more than 50% of the entire global store-of-value sector to hit that seven-figure mark.

However, when the first U.S. gold ETF launched in 2004, the entire gold market was worth about $2.5 trillion. Over the past two decades, it has ballooned to almost $40 trillion. This growth can be attributed to such factors as government debt, geopolitical uncertainty, and so on. 

The total market size could swell to an estimated $121 trillion at this rate. In such a case, Bitcoin would only need to capture a 17% market share to be worth $1 million per coin.

The path is not without risks on both sides of the equation. The growth of safe-haven assets could stall due to the lack of macroeconomic drivers. Another risk is that Bitcoin simply fails to eat into gold’s market share.

Conversely, Hougan warns that his projections might actually be too conservative. If institutional adoption speeds up, Bitcoin could capture a much bigger share of the current store of value market.