The market capitalization of Bitcoin (BTC) it could reach up to $200 trillion in the next nine years, if legendary Bitcoiner Adam Back is to be believed.
โEarlier this year I was curious about the claim 'bitcoin 2x per year on average',โ the early Bitcoin user and founder of Bitcoin development firm Blockstream wrote in a Twitter thread posted this weekend.
He went on to say that the claim โprovesโ and that BTC has, in fact, risen on average 2,036 times per year between January 2013 and December 2022.
If the trend continues, the price of each bitcoin will reach 10 million dollars at the end of the next two halveswhile the asset's total market capitalization will reach a whopping $200 trillion, Back wrote.
The Bitcoin halving occurs approximately every four years, and the reward paid to miners is halved. Historically, halvings have been catalysts for major bull markets in the coin, which in turn have fueled bull runs across the broader digital asset market.
Bitcoin's current market capitalization stood at $417.2 billion, or $0.4 trillion, at the time of writing. The upside potential is, in other words, still huge if the legendary Bitcoin developer is correct in his prediction.
Hal Finney's original prediction
In his Twitter thread, Adam Back also noted that the $200 trillion market cap is the same as the one predicted by early Bitcoin user Hal Finney in 2009.
According to Finney, such a market capitalization could be achieved if Bitcoin "becomes the dominant payment system in use around the world."
โThen the total value of the currency should equal the total value of all the wealth in the world,โ Finney, who died in 2014, wrote at the time.
Back added that he does not believe that Bitcoin adoption will slow down over time, nor that volatility will be less in the future. He even said that adoption could lead to โhyperbitcoinization jetsโ, where โrapid viral adoption destroys a weak currency in a hyperinflationary frenzyโ.
โPeople get pragmatic, adapt quickly if they see fiat melt away, a flood of others protect savings through bitcoin,โ the Blockstream founder predicted, while saying that regular Bitcoin users โwill not have many incentives to sell in size".
As a result, there will be less and less BTC available on the open market for newcomers to buy, and the only way these latecomers can buy bitcoin will be to "pull" it out of existing users' cold wallets, Back wrote.
