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 (BTC -0.86%), 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.
Scarcity is more than a meme
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.
Image source: Getty Images.
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.
Demand is growing fast
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.
Institutional credibility matters because global debt just hit a record $313 trillion, raising the appeal of non-sovereign assets, which is to say assets that aren’t printable by decree in the way that fiat currencies are. As fiat currencies get printed to pay interest on rising debt, Bitcoin will retain its purchasing value. And that’s part of the reason corporations are jumping in to get exposure too.
Roughly 60 non-crypto companies have adopted a Bitcoin treasury strategy, earmarking about $11.3 billion for buying and holding coins since April. These Bitcoin treasury companies aim to buy the coin on behalf of shareholders as their primary value-generation mechanism — though it’s unclear exactly what value these businesses actually produce beyond levered exposure to Bitcoin.
If the digital gold thesis ever truly catches on at the sovereign level, perhaps in the form of Bitcoin reserves filled with the allocation of public money, the path to $1 million could compress from decades to years. It is not guaranteed, but the building blocks (ETFs, treasury tools, custody standards) are suddenly mainstream.
How soon is “soon”?
Assuming institutional inflows keep surpassing new supply, Bitcoin’s price should grind higher over the long run.
It would be surprising if its price wasn’t more than $1 million by 2040. Likewise, it would also be surprising if its price didn’t multiply in value during the next five years or so as a result of the trends discussed above. That probably won’t drive it all the way to $1 million per coin, but under the right macroeconomic and sentiment conditions, it’s possible.
A liquidity shock or strict new regulations could interrupt that trend, and Bitcoin is still untested as a true safe asset. It fell hard alongside stocks during the 2020 pandemic slump and briefly during the 2024 tariff scare.
There is also execution risk. ETFs could see prolonged net outflows if risk appetite collapses, or companies might dump their treasuries to plug operating holes. Finally, lost-coin estimates are fuzzy; if many fewer coins are lost than believed, the scarcity premium shrinks.
Investors should therefore treat the $1 million price target as an arbitrary milestone derived from the coin’s inherent favorable qualities as an investment, not as a promise. The simplest way to gain some upside here is simply to buy and hold the coin for the long haul.
