Podcast Episode: Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitcoin – An experimential auto generated podcast based on this post. Just trying things!

I have a friend who likes to needle me. Every time Bitcoin comes up, he says: “Bitcoin only goes up.”

I have never said that. Not once. What I actually say sounds nothing like it.

Only invest what you can leave invested for at least five years.

That one isn’t even Bitcoin advice. It’s how I think about any position I take. Money you might need in two years has no business in an asset that can move 40% in a quarter. That has nothing to do with Bitcoin specifically — it’s just the difference between investing and gambling with a deadline attached.

Invest only what you can afford to lose. Assume it’s going to zero.

Expect it to drop 50% tomorrow. If you wouldn’t be fine with that, don’t invest in Bitcoin.

Read those again and notice what they have in common. Every single one leads with the downside. Assume zero. Assume the crash. Assume you might need the money before it works. That is the opposite of “only goes up.” My friend is mocking a position I’ve never held. The naive bull says the price can’t fall. I say plan for it to fall, size accordingly, and only then talk about the upside.

So let’s talk about the upside — because there is one, and it’s the whole point.

I expect Bitcoin to reach $13 million per coin, in today’s dollars, which means you don’t need to risk much to get an outsized return.

This is where people assume I’ve quietly rejoined the “number go up” crowd. I haven’t. That figure is not a moon target. It’s the output of an assumption, and it has a ceiling.

The upside is capped — and that’s a feature

Bitcoin’s price isn’t set by hope. Over a long enough horizon it’s set by how much monetary premium it pulls away from other assets — the portion of gold, bonds, real estate, and cash that people hold not to use, but simply to store value across time.

That pool is enormous, but it is finite. There is only so much store-of-value wealth in existence to migrate. Divide the share you think Bitcoin absorbs by a supply that is fixed at 21 million coins, and you get a price. At $13 million per coin, the whole network is worth on the order of $270 trillion in today’s dollars — a large fraction of global store-of-value wealth, but a fraction. Change your assumption about how much premium migrates and the number moves. What the number cannot do is run away to infinity.

Bitcoin cannot be worth a quadrillion dollars per coin in today’s dollars. There isn’t that much monetary premium on Earth to absorb. So the upside is bounded — not by sentiment, but by arithmetic. That’s what makes it a bet worth sizing carefully rather than a lottery ticket: capped, known downside on one side; a large but calculable ceiling on the other.

I’ll admit the timeline is the soft part. It might take 15 or 20 years to get there. But here’s the thing most people miss — they already have that long. They’re saving for retirement anyway. They’re going to wait thirty years regardless. If you’re already waiting, waiting a little longer in an asset with this asymmetry costs you almost nothing and could change the outcome entirely.

Where the price comes from right now

None of that describes today’s price. Today’s price is driven by sentiment and speculation. It’s reflexive — it goes up because it’s going up, and down because it’s going down. That’s not a flaw I’m hiding; it’s just what the price is in this phase.

Underneath the speculation is a floor, and the floor is driven by adoption. The people who buy every week regardless of price — the DCA crowd, people like me — don’t chase the euphoric spikes. We can’t set the top. But steady, price-insensitive buying does set a base. Historically that base has tracked something like the 200-week moving average: far below the manic highs, and Bitcoin has spent very little of its life beneath it. I won’t call it a guaranteed floor — the 2022 bear market pierced it by roughly 25% for a few months, so it’s a gravity zone, not a law of physics — but the mechanism is real. Persistent buyers put a bid under an asset that speculators periodically abandon.

So the two prices live at once: the euphoric price sentiment prints on the way up, and the adoption price the steady buyers can actually defend. The gap between them is the volatility everyone’s afraid of.

The part nobody wants to hear

Most people never engage with any of this, and I understand why. They have more immediate concerns — rent, childcare, the next paycheck. Monetary theory feels like a luxury when you’re focused on this month.

But here’s what I’d gently point out: a lot of the immediate concerns are downstream of the money itself. Asset prices outrunning wages, so a house costs more years of labor than it did for your parents. Savings that quietly lose ground every year you hold them. A whole economy pulled toward the short term because holding cash is a slow leak.

That last one has a name: time preference — how much you value having something now versus later. When your money holds its value, when a dollar saved today still buys as much in twenty years, the rational move is to defer, save, and build things that pay off slowly. Good money lowers your time preference; it makes patience pay. Debased money does the reverse. When every dollar you hold is quietly bleeding out, saving becomes a mistake and spending now becomes the smart play. That raises time preference across an entire society — and a high-time-preference society stops building for a future it no longer trusts its money to reach. Shorter horizons, thinner savings, more debt, less patience, less long-term anything. You can watch it happen without ever naming the cause.

People point at these problems and blame a dozen other things. Many of them trace back to a money that can be expanded at will. Most people never make the connection, because the tax is invisible — it doesn’t show up as a line item, it shows up as a life that costs more than it should.

You don’t have to accept the whole worldview to notice the mechanism. That’s all I’m asking anyone to do: notice it.

The long-term vision

Here’s where I think this goes.

Bitcoin is in a monetization phase. An asset that starts with no monetary value and slowly acquires it doesn’t move in a straight line — it moves in violent, speculative waves, because the market is arguing, in real time, about what it’s worth. That argument is the volatility. Every cycle, a little more of the monetary premium gets absorbed and becomes permanent. The floor rises. The speculative froth on top gets smaller relative to the base underneath it.

The endpoint isn’t a number screaming upward forever. The endpoint is boring. As the market cap grows and the premium fills in, the swings compress. The thing that today feels like a rollercoaster settles into a savings technology — something you hold the way earlier generations held land or gold, without checking the price every morning. The speculators leave because there’s no longer a fast trade in it. What’s left is money that holds its value across decades because no one can print more.

When that happens, the adoption price and the market price finally converge. There’s no more gap for volatility to live in. Bitcoin stops being a bet and becomes what it was always trying to be: a place to put the economic energy you earned this year and get it back, intact, in twenty.

And there’s a symmetry worth sitting with. The people who understand this early are the ones who get the outsized return — but they’re also the ones building the floor. Every steady buyer accumulating through the fear is being paid for being early and pulling the endpoint closer. The adoption that eventually makes Bitcoin boring is the same adoption that makes it valuable now. So early understanding is rewarded twice: once in your own return, and once in how much sooner the whole thing arrives. You’re not just front-running the monetization — you’re part of it.

And when it arrives, the question itself changes. Today everyone asks what one Bitcoin is worth in dollars, because dollars are the measuring stick. The endpoint is where the stick flips. You stop asking how many dollars your Bitcoin is worth and start asking what it buys — and under a money that can’t be printed, that answer grows every year instead of shrinking. As the world gets more productive, things get cheaper measured against a fixed supply. Your savings don’t just hold their ground; they quietly buy more of the world each year you leave them alone.

That’s the actual invitation. Not get rich in dollars and cash out — help build the thing that makes “cash out” a strange idea, because the money is finally worth keeping. Every person who understands it early pulls that day closer for everyone else.

That’s the whole thesis. Not “it only goes up.” It goes up and down violently, for now, for a reason — and the reason ends. Plan for the down. Size for the zero. And understand that the volatility scaring everyone off is simply the price of being early to something that intends to become boring.

I’ve never said Bitcoin only goes up. What I say is less comforting and more useful: assume the worst, size for it, and let the math do the rest. But once the downside is handled, you’re free to look past the price at what’s being built — a money that can’t be debased, savings that buy more each year instead of less, a future that arrives a little sooner every time one more person understands it. That’s the part worth joining. Not the trade — the thing on the other side of it. It’s early, and there’s room. Come help build it.