There is a chart that goes round Bitcoin Twitter every few months. It shows every asset class on earth as a coloured rectangle, and a tiny orange square in the corner labelled Bitcoin.
The version doing the rounds says one thousand trillion dollars.12 I wanted to know if that was real.
So I rebuilt it. Every line, from the original report rather than from the chart.
The short answer: about $910 trillion
That is the total value of everything people hold as a store of value. Property, bonds, shares, cash, gold, collectibles and Bitcoin.
It is close to the number in the chart. But it gets there differently, and one of the differences matters a great deal.
$910 trillion of gross stores of value. $570 trillion of net household wealth after debts.10 $144 trillion of actual money.4
All three are correct. They answer different questions, which is why people argue about this without ever disagreeing.
Rebuilding the number, line by line
Here is every asset class with its actual source. The middle column is the chart everyone shares, the right column is what the original reports say.
| Asset class | The chart | Rebuilt from source | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real estate Residential, commercial and farmland | $370T | $393.3T1 | Sound |
| Bonds Every tradeable debt security | $318T | $160.7T2 | Out by $157T |
| Equities Every listed company on earth | $135T | $151.9T3 | Sound |
| Broad money 169 countries, 99% of world GDP | $129T | $144.0T4 | Sound |
| Gold 220,000 tonnes above ground | $22T | $31.1T56 | Stale by 41% |
| Art, cars, collectibles The softest number here | $27T | $27.0T22 | Unsourced |
| Bitcoin 20.09M coins | $2T | $1.6T25 | Live |
| Total | $1,003T | $909.6T |
The bond line is not bonds. It is all the debt in the world
This is the error, and it is an easy one to make. The world's actual bond market is $160.7 trillion.2
The $318 trillion in the chart is close to the total global debt figure, which was $348 trillion at the end of 2025.7 That number includes bank loans and mortgages, not just bonds.
Which creates a problem. The mortgages inside it are claims on the houses already counted in the real estate line.
That single line is overstated by $157 trillion. The chart's total only comes out $93 trillion too high, because its other lines are understated and partly cancel the error.
Picture a £300,000 house with a £200,000 mortgage. The chart counts the house at £300,000 and the loan at £200,000, so £500,000 of the world's wealth.
There is still only one house. The mortgage just decides who owns how much of it.
Gold is the other one worth knowing about. The chart priced it when gold was near $3,300, and it is $4,391 today.6
So the correct figure is $31 trillion, not $22 trillion. Since gold is the yardstick everyone measures Bitcoin against, that is a 41% understatement of the thing being measured against.
There are three honest answers, and they differ by three times
This is the part nobody explains. Two sensible people can disagree about this by a factor of three without either of them being wrong.
It depends entirely on which pile you point at.
| Which number | Figure | What it actually measures |
|---|---|---|
| Net household wealth | $570T10 | What families own after every debt is subtracted. UBS puts personal wealth above $500T on its own method.11 |
| Gross stores of value | $910T | Every pool a saver could move money out of. The right one for asking what Bitcoin could capture. |
| The full balance sheet | $1,800T10 | Every asset plus every mirrored financial claim. Too big, because it counts the same value repeatedly. |
Net worth is the right measure of how rich the world is. Gross stores of value is the right measure of how much money is looking for a home.
The money grows 7% a year. The economy grows 3.
This is the most important number on the page, and it is measured rather than forecast. Global broad money went from $26 trillion in 2000 to $144 trillion in December 2025.4
That is 7.09% a year, across 169 countries covering 99% of world output. Two other sources land in the same place.
| What is growing | Rate | Over |
|---|---|---|
| Global broad money | 7.09% | 2000 to 2025, 169 countries4 |
| US M2, median | 6.60% | Since 196016 |
| The world economy | 4.73% | 2005 to 2025, nominal17 |
Look at the last row. The money grows faster than the things money buys, every single year.
That gap does not vanish. It lands in prices, which is where your house price came from and why your savings account has never once beaten it.
Here is that claim checked. Global debt rose by $208 trillion between 2005 and 2025,7 and global output rose by $71 trillion.17
That is $2.92 of new credit for every $1 of new output. Jeff Booth quotes roughly four to one from his own period, and measured over the last twenty years it is closer to three to one.15
A system that needs three pounds of credit to make one pound of economy cannot repay that debt out of the economy. It gets inflated away instead, which is the 7% you just looked at.
Why $10 million a coin is not the big number you think
Here is the mistake almost everyone makes, on both sides of the argument. They argue about a price and never convert it back into a share.
Start with the 7% above. What happens if Bitcoin does nothing at all except keep pace with the money supply for forty years?
At 7% a year, $81,092 becomes $1.21 million by 2066. And Bitcoin's share of the world's savings is exactly what it is today, 0.18%.
It won nothing. It just was not diluted.
So a million-dollar Bitcoin is not a bull case. It is the null result.
Which means most of that number is not Bitcoin going up. It is the pound going down.
Run the scary numbers backwards
Take the headline prices people throw around. Strip out forty years of debasement, and express what is left as a share of the world's stores of value.
| Headline price 2066 inflation left in | Same price in today’s money | Needs headline/yr | Over money supply | Share of the world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1 million | $0.22M | 6.5% | −0.5 points | 0.15%, less than today |
| $2 million | $0.44M | 8.3% | +1.3 points | 0.31% |
| $5 million | $1.09M | 10.9% | +3.9 points | 0.77% |
| $10 million | $2.18M | 12.8% | +5.8 points | 1.5%, under half of gold |
| $20 million | $4.36M | 14.8% | +7.8 points | 3.1%, just under gold today |
| $45 million | $9.80M | 17.1% | +10.1 points | 6.9%, which is Saylor's 7% share. He said $13M by 2045; the $45M is that share carried to 206613 |
$10 million here is not the same as the $9.9 million you will see quoted for Saylor's base case. One is a headline price with forty years of inflation in it. The other is in today's money.
Saylor's 7% is $9.9M in today's money, which is $45M as a headline price. A $10M headline price is only $2.18M in today's money, so it buys 1.5% of the world, not 7%.
They look like the same number and they are four and a half times apart. Forty years of 3.88% debasement multiplies every headline price by 4.59. Nothing on this page is a headline price unless the column says so.
Ten million dollars a coin is Bitcoin becoming half of gold. Twenty million is Bitcoin becoming gold.24
Not gold plus the bond market. Just gold, the thing that already exists and that nobody finds shocking.
The same logic cuts the other way, and it should. Going from $81,000 to $10 million is a 123-fold rise in the number, but only a 27-fold rise in what it buys you.
The other 4.6 times is the currency shrinking underneath it. A price target is always a claim about two things at once, and it never says which one is doing the work.
Before the model: what will things actually cost?
Every price on this page is in today's money. A £4 coffee means "costs what £4 buys you now", not "the ticket says £4".
That matters because the ticket price in 2066 will be far higher. Forty years of debasement multiplies every price tag by 4.59 times.
It does not. The 2066 ticket price of a £4 coffee is about £22. What has not changed is how much of your earnings it takes.
Quoting everything in today's money is the only way to compare 2066 with a price you actually know. Both numbers are shown in the model below.
The Chart of the Century, turned into rates
Mark Perry's chart tracks 14 categories of US prices from 2000 to 2024 against overall inflation.29 It is the best empirical answer to "what gets cheaper".
I converted every category into a real rate per year, which is what you need to project anything forward.
The split is brutally clean. Televisions fell 15.9% a year in real terms, hospital services rose 2.1%.
My first read of this was that machines get cheaper and human labour does not. That is wrong, or at least badly incomplete.
Test it against wages, not inflation
If the expensive side were just "a person's time", those services should rise in line with wages. Wages rose 127.4% over the same period, against 89.9% inflation.29
So the real test is which services outran wages, not which outran prices.
| Service | vs inflation | vs wages | What that means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haircuts, laundry, restaurants, car repair | rose | ~0.0% | Tracked wages almost exactly32 |
| Childcare | +0.52% | −0.23% | Wages explain all of it |
| Medical care services | +0.80% | +0.05% | Wages explain all of it |
| College tuition | +1.69% | +0.93% | Excess. Something else is going on |
| Hospital services | +2.08% | +1.31% | Excess. Something else is going on |
There it is. Most services just track wages, which is the ordinary Baumol effect and no scandal at all.
Only two run meaningfully past wages, for 24 years straight. They happen to be the two most subsidised and most third-party-paid things on the list.
The New York Fed found tuition rises about 60 pence for every extra pound of subsidised loans, and 55p per pound of grant aid.31 An NBER study found for-profit colleges eligible for federal aid charged 78% more than ineligible ones.
So the chart is not machines against people. It is competition against protection. Things exposed to open competition collapse in price. Things propped up by subsidy, third-party payment or restricted supply do the opposite.
And housing sits on the expensive side for a reason this page has already argued at length: it is carrying a monetary premium. It is not just a house, it is a savings account with a roof.
Which gives every assumption in this model a source
So I stopped guessing. Each item below takes the rate its own category actually delivered.
| Item | Real change a year | Where that rate comes from | 2066 in today's money | 2066 ticket price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A mid-range car | −2.6% | What new cars actually did. Not the autonomy case | £6,972 | £32,007 |
| A year of groceries | 0.0% | Food tracked inflation almost exactly | £5,000 | £22,953 |
| A flat white | +0.5% | A service. The chart's service side ran +0.5% to +2.1% | £5 | £22 |
| A year's rent | +1.0% | A claim on the same land, so it moves with housing | £23,226 | £106,477 |
| A UK house | +1.0% | US housing did −0.2%. UK land has done better, so this is the honest worst case | £431,770 | £1,982,052 |
My earlier version had the car at −5% a year on the strength of ARK's autonomy work.21 History says new cars did −2.6%.
I have used history. If electric drivetrains and autonomy do deliver −5%, a car costs £2,570 rather than £6,972, and every number below improves. That is upside I have left out rather than banked.
Why there is no laptop in that list
I had one, at £53 in 2066. It was wrong, and the reason is worth understanding because it applies to a lot of technology.
The CPI computer index is hedonically adjusted. BLS's own worked example: a laptop goes from $1,000 to $1,200 with a better processor and screen, and that is recorded as a price fall, because you got more machine per dollar.30
Your dad's £4,000 laptop and a £4,000 laptop today cost the same. The second one is vastly better. The price of the category did not fall, the quality per pound exploded.
So "a laptop will cost £53" is what the index implies and is not a lived prediction. Nobody will buy a 2026-spec machine in 2066, any more than you would buy a 1986 one now.
The honest version of the same arithmetic: the same £1,200 buys roughly 23 times the machine. For fast-improving technology, the gain arrives as a better thing, not a cheaper one. It may not even be called a laptop.
So the model now only lists things where "the same thing" still exists in forty years: a car, a food shop, a coffee, rent, a house.
That is a narrower claim and a more defensible one. The technology gain is real, it just does not show up as a number you can put in a shopping list.
And "4% of a house" means your £20 covers 4% of one. Whether that sounds good depends entirely on what £20 buys you today, which is five coffees.
Model it yourself
Drag the share and everything moves with it, including the map. The whole argument on this page is one number, so it is worth playing with.
of the $2,967T of stores of value the world will hold, in today's money
What your £20 would buy in 2066 · in today’s money, with the 2066 ticket price beside it
Rates come from the Chart of the Century29, not from guesswork. Only categories that will still exist in 2066 are listed. The house moves with the slider: if Bitcoin absorbs the world’s savings, property loses the monetary premium it is carrying, with a floor at its shelter value.
The $846 trillion that nobody owes
You will see a much bigger number quoted: $846 trillion of derivatives,8 or even "$2.3 quadrillion" once someone adds it to the debt.
Do not use it. That figure is the notional, and the notional is a multiplier, not money.
Two banks agree an interest rate swap on £100 million notional. One pays a fixed 4%, the other pays whatever the floating rate is.
The £100 million never moves. It exists only to work out the interest, and what actually changes hands is the difference between the two rates.
That might be £500,000 a year. Nobody is £100 million in debt.
Scale it up and the BIS publishes three numbers, not one. The gap between the first and the last is the whole story.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Notional outstanding | $846T8 | The size of the machine. Every trade counted twice, because both dealers report it. |
| Gross market value | $21.8T8 | What replacing every contract today would cost. Just 2.6% of the notional. |
| Gross credit exposure | about $3.3T9 | The real number, after netting. The BIS says this runs at 14 to 16% of market value. |
So the headline figure is roughly 260 times the thing people think it measures. Use $348 trillion of real debt instead, and nobody can touch you.
Notional tells you the size and the interconnection of the machine. Gross market value tells you what is at stake if nothing breaks.
AIG's swap book looked modest right up to September 2008, when the netting assumptions stopped holding and the US government put $182 billion into one insurer. It is a measure of fragility, not a measure of what is owed.
So how big is Bitcoin in all this?
Bitcoin is 0.18% of the world's stores of value.25 Gold is about 3.4%.
That comparison is the cleanest one available, because gold is a pure store of value with no yield and no counterparty. But there is a catch that most people skip.
Gold's share depends entirely on what you put underneath it, and three different answers are all correct. Every figure below uses the same $31 trillion of gold, and the same $1.63 trillion of Bitcoin. Only the denominator changes.
| Measured against | Size | Gold | Bitcoin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everything people store wealth in, property and art included | $910T | 3.4% | 0.18% |
| Financial assets only: equities, bonds, money | $488T | 6.4% | 0.33% |
| Equities and bonds only, and investment gold only24 | $312T | 2.7% | 0.52% |
The first row is the one this page uses, and it is the one to quote. It is the widest and the hardest to argue with, because it counts the house as well as the share portfolio. Every chart below is on that row.
Gold has been worth anywhere from 0.62% to 4.4% of everything since 1960. It is 3.5% today, and the 1980 peak was 4.4%.39
The useful comparison is not 1980. It is 2000. Gold was 0.62% of the world's wealth then and is 3.5% now, five and a half times the share, inside twenty-six years. The 1980 peak was only about a third above today, because property was already the biggest thing in the pie back then and it swamps the difference.
Take property out and the swings get violent. Against financial assets alone gold went from 13.5% in 1980 to 1.3% in 1999 and back to 6.5%.38 Against a year of world output it ran at 23% in 1900, fell to 3.7% by 1970 while the price was still pinned at $35, and is about 27% today.37
You will also see 0.19% quoted for the year 2000. That counts only privately held investment gold, not the whole above-ground stock, so it is about seven times lower than everything else here. It is not comparable and it is not used.23
So there is no number to call gold's rightful share. A monetary asset gets whatever the world decides to give it that decade, and every way of measuring it moves by multiples inside one working lifetime.
Project the $910 trillion forward at 3% real growth and it becomes $2,967 trillion by 2066, in today's money. What Bitcoin is worth then depends on one assumption only.
| If Bitcoin ends up as... | Share | Per coin | Return needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| A niche asset that survived | 1% | $1.4M | 7.4% a year |
| What gold holds today | 3.2% | $4.5M | 10.6% a year |
| Saylor's published base case13 | 7% | $9.9M | 12.8% a year |
| The primary global reserve asset | 15% | $21.2M | 14.9% a year |
| Saylor's published bull case13 | 22% | $31.1M | 16.0% a year |
| "Half of everything"14 | 50% | $70.7M | 18.4% a year |
Every price there is in today's money and assumes 21 million coins. Between 3 and 4 million are lost for good,20 so the real figures are roughly 20% higher.
What 12.8% a year actually means
Saylor's base case needs Bitcoin to return 12.8% a year after inflation for forty years. The obvious move is to compare that to the stock market, and the obvious move is wrong.
| The comparison people reach for | Real return | Why it misleads |
|---|---|---|
| The S&P 500, 1926 to 202618 | 7.29% | Companies earning and reinvesting profits. A perpetual engine. |
| Warren Buffett, 1965 to 202419 | 15.40% | A skill outcome, and 93% of fund managers fail to beat a plain index over 20 years.27 |
Both figures are real, inflation-adjusted returns, so the arithmetic is sound.18 The problem is that neither describes what Bitcoin is doing.
Buffett picked companies for sixty years without getting it badly wrong. Bitcoin does not pick anything, so asking whether it can match Buffett is not a question about Bitcoin.
The right comparison is gold in the 1970s
Bitcoin's 12.8% is not a stock-picking result. It is a monetary asset being repriced, and there is exactly one clean modern precedent for that.
| Gold | Price | Real return a year | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 1971 to Jan 1980 | $35 to $850 | +35.5% | Nixon closed the gold window and gold repriced 24-fold in eight years.26 |
| Jan 1980 to 2000 | $850 to $279 | −9.1% | Then it gave back 85% in real terms over twenty years.26 |
| 2000 to 2026 | $279 to $4,391 | +8.4% | Twenty-six years to make the round trip worth having.6 |
Your instinct about 1971 was right. Gold was fixed at $35 an ounce, so through the 1960s its real value fell 1.4% a year while the price never moved.35
Freeing it in 1971 released a decade of suppressed repricing all at once. That is what the spike actually is.
Read the first row again. The last time the world repriced its monetary asset, it ran at 35% a year for eight years.
Bitcoin's base case asks for 12.8%, and only 9.6 points of that is the repricing at all. Measured against the thing Bitcoin is actually doing, that is about a third of the pace gold managed.
Not the rate. The duration. Gold cleared the rate by miles and then failed to hold it, losing most of the gain over the following twenty years.
Bitcoin's 12.8% has to be sustained for forty years with no twenty-year hole in the middle. That is the real risk, and it is about adoption stalling rather than about the arithmetic being heroic.
First, how easy it is to prove anything
Pick two dates and Bitcoin's return becomes whatever you want it to be. Here is the same asset, over broadly the same decade, measured seven ways.
| Measured from | To | Held | Multiple | Real return a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2018 bottom, $3,206 | Oct 2025 peak | 6.8y | 39.3× | 66.12% |
| Dec 2018 bottom, $3,206 | today | 7.8y | 25.3× | 46.85% |
| Dec 2017 peak, $19,783 | Oct 2025 peak | 7.8y | 6.4× | 22.86% |
| Dec 2017 peak, $19,783 | today | 8.8y | 4.1× | 13.83% |
| Dec 2017 peak, $19,783 | Jun 2026 low | 8.5y | 2.9× | 9.98% |
| Nov 2021 peak, $68,789 | today | 4.9y | 1.2× | 0.23% |
| Oct 2025 high, $126,073 | today | 1.0y | 0.6× | −38.86% |
Nought point two percent to sixty-six percent. Every row is true, sourced and correctly calculated.2836
Which is why anyone quoting a single pair of dates, in either direction, is telling you nothing.
Second, why the early years have to go
The usual answer is to measure from the start. That is worse, not better, and the reason is the market cap rather than the price.
| Year | Price | Market cap | What Bitcoin was, as an asset |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $13.50 | $0.1bn | Smaller than one branch of a supermarket chain |
| 2013 | $947 | $11.6bn | A mid-cap company |
| 2016 | $970 | $15.6bn | Still a mid-cap |
| 2017 | $14,156 | $238bn | First year it was large enough to be investable at scale |
| 2021 | $46,266 | $874bn | A large-cap |
| 2026 | $81,092 | $1.63T | An asset class |
Going from $11 billion to $238 billion is a 21-fold move on something smaller than Greggs.28 That cannot be repeated from $1.6 trillion.
So measuring from 2013, or worse from under $1,000, imports returns that were only available because the thing was tiny. 2017 is the first honest starting line.
Third, the one number worth carrying
Take the day-to-day price out entirely and measure the four-year moving average, which is one full halving cycle and has no start date to argue about.
Bitcoin's four-year moving average has grown 33% a year in real terms since 2017.
Not 66%, which is two cherry-picked ends. Not 0.2%, which is the other cherry-pick. 33%, from a line nobody gets to choose the start of, beginning the first year Bitcoin was big enough to count.
For context, the base case that gets Bitcoin to 7% of the world needs 12.76%. The moving average has run at two and a half times that.
That does not make forty more years a certainty, and section 12 lists ten reasons to be careful. It does mean the required rate is not the thing standing in the way.
The four-year window, which nobody gets to cherry-pick
Bitcoin's supply halves roughly every four years, so four years is one full cycle. Measure every four-year window from year-end to year-end and the date-picking disappears.
Starting at the 2017 peak also means starting late enough that the sub-$1,000 era cannot flatter the numbers.
Five windows, five answers, and all five clear the bar. But five year-ends is still five choices.
So I ran it daily instead. Throw a dart at a calendar, buy that day, sell four years later to the day. I did that for every single day since the 2017 peak, which is 1,738 throws.34
Not one of them lost money. The worst came out at 2.4% a year, the middling one at 30%, and 87% beat the 12.8% the base case needs.
That is the honest version. The floor is far lower than five year-ends suggest, and the bar still gets cleared closer to nine times in ten than ten.
The start date is pinned to the 2017 peak on purpose, so no throw is allowed to begin in the years when Bitcoin was small enough to move on nothing.
This is the line worth watching. Bitcoin's four-year moving average has not fallen on a single day since it began.34
Over the same period the daily price lost 77% at its worst. Same asset, same days.
Now: about 33% a year after inflation. That is the average of every four-year window since the 2017 peak, and the four-year moving average has grown at much the same rate over the same period.
Later: a lot less, and that is what the model says should happen. The power law prices Bitcoin as time since the genesis block raised to 5.69, so the annual rate is 5.69 divided by the number of years elapsed. It falls every year by construction.33
| If the power law holds | Real return a year | Against the 12.8% the base case needs |
|---|---|---|
| Now to 2030 | 48.7% | clears it four times over |
| 2030s | 19.4% | still clears it |
| 2040s | 12.5% | about level, and crossing below around 2044 |
| 2050 to 2066 | 8.0% | below it |
| Whole forty years | 15.5% | clears it |
So the honest shape is not a flat 33% for forty years. It is a high rate now that decays to single digits, and the forty-year average still lands above what the base case needs.
The first leg looks the steepest because Bitcoin is currently sitting below the power-law line, so part of that 48.7% is catching up rather than growing.
None of these numbers tell you what to do. The one that matters is how much Bitcoin you would need, at a rate you actually believe, to stop working.
→ Run it in the Financial Freedom Calculator. Put in your own monthly costs and your own assumed rate, 12.8% or 15.5% or 8%, and it gives you the number of Bitcoin and the year. It takes about thirty seconds.
And if the power law holds
There is a published model saying Bitcoin's price tracks time since launch raised to a power of about 5.69.33 I fitted it myself rather than take the number.
Seventeen year-end prices from 2010 to 2026, a straight line through log price against log time. My fit returns an exponent of 5.69 and an R² of 0.951, which reproduces the published figure.
| Power law says | Headline price | In today's money | Share of the world |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2030 | $461,187 | $396,049 | — |
| 2040 | $3,980,878 | $2,336,316 | — |
| 2050 | $18,927,956 | $7,591,667 | — |
| 2066 | $120,039,909 | $26,184,725 | 18.5% |
That lands between Saylor's base case and his bull case, at an implied 15.5% a year real. Which is roughly Buffett's record.
Your £20 becomes £6,458 in today's money on that path.
A power law is a curve fitted to a log-log chart. It has a plausible mechanism behind it, network growth times Metcalfe-style pricing, but nothing guarantees a line drawn through 17 years keeps holding for another 40.
There is peer-reviewed work arguing the structure is weaker than the fit suggests, even where the forecasts perform well.33 I include it as a third independent method, not as a prediction.
Gold's share says 3.2% to 5%. Saylor's capital-flow model says 7% base and 22% bull. The power law, fitted here from scratch, says 18.5%.
None of them agree. All of them clear the bear case by a wide margin, and that agreement matters more than the spread.
Nearly nine in ten four-year holds since the 2017 peak beat the base case, and not one of them lost money. The power law then says that rate decays, and still averages above the bar across the forty years.
That is the strongest single fact in this research. No four-year hold since the 2017 peak has lost money in real terms, and nearly nine in ten beat what the base case needs.
It does not make forty years a certainty. It does mean the required rate is not the thing standing in the way.
Nine years is not forty. The 2021 row shows why: someone who bought that top has made 0.23% a year real over five years, and the base case has to absorb stretches like that and still average out.
And returns are decelerating by design. But notice that supports the case rather than undermining it: Saylor models a slowdown to 20% a year, which is about 16% real, and the base case only needs 12.8%.13
Which makes it a different kind of bet entirely
Break the 12.8% apart and it stops looking like a return. Three points of it is simply the world getting richer.
The other 9.6% is a re-rating, Bitcoin's share moving from 0.18% to 7% over forty years. That is not profit, it is other people deciding to hold it instead of something else.
The stock market's 7% is produced. Companies earn, reinvest and pay dividends, so a bad decade still compounds.
Bitcoin's re-rating is transferred, and needs a continuous net inflow of buyers with no earnings floor underneath it. Different engine, different failure mode.
So the claim is big, and smaller than it sounds. Bitcoin does not have to out-earn the world economy for forty years.
It has to be repriced once, from a rounding error to roughly what gold is worth, and then stay there.
Check this yourself
Every figure on this page links to its original source below. The two worth checking first are the ones that do the most work.
Source 4 is the 7% money growth figure, and source 2 is the bond market number that the popular chart gets wrong. Neither requires you to take anyone's word for anything.
The four-year figures were built twice, separately, and met in the middle. One pass fixed the buy date and looked forwards, the other fixed the sell date and looked back. Both landed on the same worst window: bought 14 April 2021, sold 14 April 2025. Two methods, one answer, is worth more than either on its own.
Keep reading
- Bitcoin vs gold: they killed gold in 5 steps, which is where the 5% question above came from.
- What is Bitcoin? if the protocol itself is the bit that has not clicked yet.
- The Financial Freedom Calculator, to run your own number instead of the world's.
What an economist would say about all this
Everything above is built to be checkable, which means it should survive someone trying to knock it down. Here is my best attempt at doing that myself.
These are the objections I think are strongest, roughly in order of how much damage they do.
The whole page is framed as savings "flowing into" Bitcoin, as if $208 trillion has to arrive for it to reach 7%. That is not how market capitalisation works.
Every purchase has a seller. A dollar of net inflow can lift market cap by many dollars, because the price is set by the thin margin of people actually trading, not by the whole stock.
This cuts both ways and I should say both. It makes the target far easier to reach than "find $208 trillion" implies. It also makes the valuation more fragile, because a number that can be bid up on light volume can be bid down the same way.
I compare Bitcoin's required 12.8% to the S&P's 7% as if they were like for like. They are not. Bitcoin's volatility has run roughly four times the S&P's.
On a risk-adjusted basis, earning 12.8% at Bitcoin's volatility is a worse deal than 7% at the S&P's. An economist would say the comparison is close to meaningless without that adjustment, and they would be right.
I made a lot of "the four-year average has never had a down day". A trailing average of any series that trended up over the sample will mechanically rise.
It is a statement about a period in which Bitcoin went up about 25 times, not a property of the asset. If Bitcoin fell 80% and stayed there, the average would fall too, just with a lag of up to four years. It removes noise. It does not remove risk.
Bitcoin is 17 years old. Projecting 40 years out is extrapolating 2.3 times beyond the entire life of the thing.
No asset class has ever been forecast that far with useful accuracy. The base rate for "new monetary technology wins within four decades" is not low, it is unknown, because the sample size is about one.
An R² of 0.951 on a log-log chart sounds decisive and is not. Log-log compresses everything, so any strongly trending series fits a straight line well.
The peer-reviewed work I cited is titled "weak structure, strong forecasts" for exactly this reason.33 I have included the model as a third opinion, and it should not be read as more than that.
The Booth calculation puts 40% of housing, 30% of equities and 75% of bonds down as monetary premium. Those are judgements, not data, and the 53.6% headline is highly sensitive to them.
Halve the housing assumption to 20% and the pool drops from $488 trillion to $410 trillion, which is 45% rather than 53.6%. The argument survives. The precision does not.
The Chart of the Century, the CPI series, the wage data and the housing comparison are all US. UK inflation, UK wages and especially UK housing have behaved differently.
I flag it on housing and nowhere else. Anyone applying these rates to a British life should treat them as directionally right and numerically approximate.
Every "your £20 buys X" figure assumes you can liquidate at the model price, in size, with a willing buyer, and ignores capital gains tax, which on these numbers would be the single largest deduction.
A 40-year hold in the UK with a gain of that size is a very large tax event, and none of the figures on this page are after tax.
The pie grows at 3% real forever, which is roughly past global growth. Growth is decelerating almost everywhere as populations age, so that may be generous.
It also assumes assets stay a constant multiple of output. That multiple has been rising for forty years, which is the financialisation story. If it mean-reverts, the denominator shrinks and every share on this page gets easier to reach for the wrong reason.
Gold's 3.4% share is what it actually achieved, including a 20-year stretch where it lost 84% in real terms. Bitcoin's 7% is a projection.
Comparing a hoped-for number to a realised one always favours the hope. The fair version is the one in the gold chart above: the realised path had a 26-year hole in it.
Three things, I think. The money supply really has grown 7% a year while output grew 3%, and that is measured, not modelled.
Bitcoin really is 0.18% of global stores of value against gold's 3.4%, so the gap is real whatever you think it will close to. And a price target really is two claims in one, so most arguments about "$10 million" are arguments about the pound, not about Bitcoin.
What does not survive is precision. Treat every number past 2030 on this page as an illustration of a mechanism, not a forecast.
Sources
Every bracketed number above jumps here. Each entry says which figure it supports, so a single claim can be checked without reading the whole page.
- Savills. World's real estate worth $393.3 trillion and is the world's largest store of wealth January 2025. Residential $286.9T, commercial $58.5T, agricultural land $47.9T. https://www.savills.com/insight-and-opinion/savills-news/381209/world-s-real-estate-worth-$393.3-trillion-and-is-the-world-s-largest-store-of-wealth
- SIFMA. 2026 Capital Markets Fact Book Global fixed income securities outstanding $160.7T in 2025, up 10.6% year on year. https://www.sifma.org/news/blog/2026-capital-markets-fact-book-key-findings
- World Federation of Exchanges. Public markets post strong growth for 2025 Global equity market capitalisation $151.94T at end-2025, up 18.5%. https://www.world-exchanges.org/news/articles/new-wfe-data-public-markets-post-strong-growth-2025-despite-geopolitical-instability
- Voronoi / Econovis. Global broad money supply reaches $144 trillion in 2025 $26T in 2000 to $144T in December 2025, a 7.0% compound annual rate. 169 countries, 99% of world GDP. https://www.voronoiapp.com/money/-Global-Broad-Money-Supply-Reaches-144-Trillion-in-2025-5166
- World Gold Council. How much gold has been mined? Above-ground stock around 220,000 tonnes. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold
- Trading Economics. Gold spot price $4,391.42 per troy ounce, 20 September 2026. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/gold
- Institute of International Finance. Global Debt Monitor Total global debt $348T at end-2025, up $29T on the year. https://www.iif.com/Products/Global-Debt-Monitor
- Bank for International Settlements. OTC derivatives statistics at end-June 2025 Notional amounts outstanding $846T. Gross market value $21.8T. https://www.bis.org/publications/202512-commentary-otc-derivatives
- Bank for International Settlements. OTC derivatives statistics: definitions Gross credit exposure adjusts gross market value for netting, and has run at 14 to 16% of market values since end-2008. https://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm
- McKinsey Global Institute. The Global Balance Sheet 2026 Household net worth $570T. Total global balance sheet near $1.8 quadrillion. https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/the-global-balance-sheet-2026-imbalance-and-divergence
- UBS. Global Wealth Report 2026 Global personal wealth above $500T after rising 10.8% in 2025. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-20260630-gwr-2026.html
- Jesse Myers. Bitcoin's Full Potential Valuation The widely shared global asset treemap. His own caveat: it "undoubtedly overstates some categories and understates others". https://www.onceinaspecies.com/p/bitcoins-full-potential-valuation
- Michael Saylor via TheStreet. Bitcoin24: $13 million per Bitcoin by 2045 Base case $280T market cap and 7% of global wealth. Bear $3M at 2%, bull $49M at 22%. https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/michael-saylor-predicts-13-million-for-bitcoin-by-2045
- Bitcoin Magazine. Michael Saylor at Bitcoin 2025 Saylor from the stage: Bitcoin would come to represent "half of the world’s value". https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/michael-saylor-presents-the-21-ways-to-wealth-at-bitcoin-2025
- Jeff Booth. The Price of Tomorrow, and subsequent interviews "Under $900 trillion in assets sits $600 trillion in debt." Technology is deflationary and the debt system cannot tolerate deflation. https://www.jeffbooth.ca/
- Macrotrends. M2 money supply, 1959 to 2026 US M2 median growth since 1960 is 6.6% a year, roughly 2.0% after inflation. https://www.macrotrends.net/3005/m2-money-supply
- World Bank via Trading Economics. World GDP Global nominal GDP $118.35T in 2025, against roughly $47T in 2005. https://tradingeconomics.com/world/gdp
- Official Data Foundation. S&P 500 returns since 1926 10.47% a year nominal with dividends reinvested, 7.29% a year after inflation. https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1926
- CNBC. Warren Buffett's return tally after 60 years Berkshire compounded 19.9% a year from 1965 to end-2024, roughly 15.4% after inflation. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/warren-buffetts-return-tally-after-60-years-5502284percent.html
- BitGo and Chainalysis. How many Bitcoins are lost? 3 to 4 million BTC believed permanently inaccessible, around 1 million of them Satoshi’s. https://www.bitgo.com/resources/blog/bitcoins-invisible-burn-lost-coins-outpace-new-supply/
- ARK Invest. ARK's autonomous taxi model Robotaxi costs approaching $0.25 a mile at scale under Wright’s Law, against roughly $1 a mile to run a private car. https://www.ark-invest.com/articles/analyst-research/autonomous-taxi-model
- Deloitte and ArtTactic. Art & Finance Report 2025 Ultra-high-net-worth art and collectible wealth $2.56T in 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/lu/en/services/consulting-financial/research/art-finance-report.html
- Gold Eagle. Gold as a percentage of global financial assets Around 5% in 1960, a peak near 5% in 1980, a bottom of 0.19% in 2000. NOT used for either chart on this page: that series counts privately held investment gold only, so it is roughly seven times lower than the whole above-ground stock and cannot share a line with the other figures here. https://www.gold-eagle.com/article/gold-percentage-global-financial-assets
- World Gold Council. Gold market primer: market size and structure Gold is about 3% of global financial assets excluding central bank reserves. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/market-primer/gold-market-primer-market-size-and-structure
- CoinDesk. Bitcoin price and market cap $81,092 per BTC and a $1.63T market cap on 21 September 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin
- Gainesville Coins. 50-year gold price history, and the Nixon Shock Gold was fixed at $35/oz until 15 August 1971, peaked at $850 in January 1980, then fell to a $279 annual average by 2000. https://www.gainesvillecoins.com/blog/gold-price-history
- S&P Global. SPIVA US Scorecard 92.89% of actively managed US large-cap funds underperformed the S&P 500 over the 20 years to end-2025. https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/spiva/article/spiva-us-year-end-2021
- CoinDesk and Bitbo. Bitcoin price history The 2017 all-time high was $19,783.21 on 17 December 2017. The bear market bottomed at $3,206 on 14 December 2018, an 84% drawdown. https://charts.bitbo.io/price/
- Mark Perry, American Enterprise Institute. Chart of the Century Price changes for 14 categories of US goods and services, January 2000 to December 2024, against overall CPI (+89.9%) and average hourly wages (+127.4%). TVs −97%, toys −72%, computer software −70.5%, cell phone service −41%, hospital services +211%, college tuition +183.8%. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Quality adjustment in the CPI BLS's own example: a laptop goes from $1,000 to $1,200 with a better processor and screen, and the hedonic adjustment records that as a price FALL. The computer index measures price per unit of quality, not what anyone pays. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Credit supply and the rise in college tuition Staff Report 733. Tuition rises roughly 60 cents for every extra dollar of subsidised loans, and about 55 cents per dollar of Pell Grant aid. A 2014 NBER study found for-profit colleges eligible for federal aid charged 78% more than ineligible ones. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr733.pdf
- Noah Smith, on the Baumol effect. Why do education, health care and child care cost so much? Haircuts, laundry, restaurants and car repair rose almost one-for-one with wages, which is what Baumol predicts. Health care, childcare and college rose much faster than wages, which Baumol alone does not explain. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-education-health-care-and
- Santostasi and Perrenod. Bitcoin's power law Price proportional to time since the genesis block raised to about 5.69, R² = 0.961 across 17 years. A critique of the structure is at arXiv 2605.21316. https://www.newsbtc.com/bitcoin-news/when-bitcoin-could-reach-10m-power-law/
- Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (FRED). CPIAUCSL and CBBTCUSD US CPI for all urban consumers, monthly from 1947, used to deflate every real figure here. Coinbase Bitcoin daily price from December 2014, used for the four-year moving average and for the 1,738 daily four-year holds measured from the 2017 peak onwards. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
- Metalcharts. Gold price history, 1970 to 2026 Annual average gold price per troy ounce. Before August 1971 gold was fixed at $35 under Bretton Woods. https://metalcharts.org/gold-price-history
- Savills, Piketty & Zucman, Deloitte and the World Bank. The whole stores-of-value pie, 1960 to 2026 World property measured by Savills from 2015 ($393.3T as of the start of 2025; the 2017 report changed method, so 2015 and 2016 are restated onto the later basis using Savills’ own +6.2% for 2017). Before 2015 it is reconstructed from Piketty & Zucman’s measured housing-to-national-income ratios for 8 rich countries carried onto world GDP, which carries roughly −40%/+25% on the early years and is what the band shows. Bitcoin’s market cap is its price times a supply computed from the real halving blocks. ⚠ The $27T for art and collectibles is an aggregator figure with no published derivation; the only primary estimate, Deloitte & ArtTactic’s ultra-high-net-worth art and collectible wealth, is $2.564T for 2024. Art is 3% of the pie and moves gold’s share by under a tenth of a point. https://www.savills.com/impacts/market-trends/the-total-value-of-global-real-estate-property-remains-the-worlds-biggest-store-of-wealth.html
- USGS, LBMA, Maddison Project and the World Bank. Gold against world output, 1870 to 2026 Above-ground stock from USGS Data Series 140 and Mineral Commodity Summaries, back-cast to 1800 on US Bureau of the Mint world production; price from 14,686 LBMA daily fixes since 1968 and MeasuringWorth before that; world GDP from the World Bank (annual, 1960 on) and the Maddison Project Database 2023 (benchmark years only before 1950, with no 1913 and no 1929). The band before 1960 is the USGS and the World Gold Council disagreeing by 9,470 tonnes about the pre-1950 base. Every figure, and what is measured against what is reconstructed, is in src/data/gold-share/SOURCES.md. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/gold-statistics-and-information
- McKinsey Global Institute, SIFMA and the World Bank. Global financial assets, 1960 to 2026 MGI, Mapping Global Capital Markets: Fifth Annual Report (Oct 2008): "the total value of the world’s financial assets — including equities, private and government debt, and deposits — climbed in 2007 by $29 trillion in nominal terms to $196 trillion". 1980 = $12T on that same basis. ⚠ The widely quoted $54T for 1990 and $212T for 2010 come from the 2011 vintage, which counts loans and NO deposits, and must never be put on one line with the 1980 figure. The chart is built from component series (World Bank equity market cap and broad money, SIFMA fixed income) and reproduces MGI’s totals to within the broad-money-minus-deposits gap. https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/
- CNBC and market data. Bitcoin's 2025 high and the 2026 correction All-time high $126,073.42 on 6 October 2025. Bitcoin fell to roughly $58,000 by June 2026 and traded at $81,092 on 21 September 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/08/bitcoin-btc-price-predictions-for-2026.html
Figures priced 21 September 2026. Scenarios are conditional projections, not forecasts, and depend entirely on the share assumption chosen. Nothing here is financial advice.