Matt Hougan laid out the ideal roadmap for BTC to hit seven figures in a memo he published on March 10, titled “How Bitcoin Gets to $1 Million,” and it starts with how analysts price Bitcoin in the first place. They treat BTC as a store of value, meaning something people park money in to protect it from inflation rather than spend, and gold has been the default choice for centuries.
Gold and Bitcoin together are worth just under $38 trillion today, with gold accounting for roughly $36 trillion of that, which leaves Bitcoin holding a little under 4% of the store-of-value market.
So at $1 million a coin, Bitcoin’s market cap would reach $21 trillion, or sixteen times its current $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin would have to own more than half of everything the world stores value in, and that is a stretch when it holds less than 4% today.
However, Hougan’s point is that the store-of-value market does not stay the same size. The entire gold market was worth about $2.5 trillion when the first US gold ETF launched in 2004, and it has grown roughly 13% a year every year since to reach $36 trillion.
At that same pace, the store-of-value market would reach about $121 trillion within a decade, at which point Bitcoin only needs 17% of it to be worth $1 million a coin. Hougan calls the move from 4% to 17% “still a lot of growth,” but says it feels well within reach.
But that assumption is the weak point in his own argument, since the gold market may not keep expanding the way it has. The 2008 financial crisis and years of central banks printing money drove much of that run, and neither of those might repeat.
When Could Bitcoin Realistically Reach $1 Million?
The Bitcoin price would have to gain 15.6 times its current value to go from $64,000 to $1 million, and for that to happen, it could take a few years or up to a decade.
Michael Saylor and Cathie Wood both point to the end of 2030 for BTC to hit $1 million, and Bitcoin would have to compound at about 87% a year to achieve that, which means the price nearly doubling every year for five years running.
Meanwhile, Bernstein gives it until 2033, which drops the growth percentage to roughly 45% a year. And taking a decade-out view, like 2035, BTC only needs to rally about 34% a year, or a doubling roughly every two and a half years, to hit one-and-six zeros.
Bitcoin’s own record says a lot about which of those is possible. The Bitcoin price traded around $600 in the middle of 2016, so over the past ten years BTC has compounded at roughly 60% a year. It was near $46,000 in August 2021, which means the last five years have delivered about 7% a year.
The ten-year count includes the 2021 bull run, when Bitcoin went from $10,000 to $69,000, while the five-year figure starts right at that peak and covers the years Bitcoin spent climbing back to where it already was.
Based on that decade of history, Bitcoin could hit $1 million within ten years, which is close to Bernstein’s 2033 call. But if the next five years look anything like the last five, it could be difficult for BTC to pull off the seven-figure dream.
Will Bitcoin Ever Hit $1 Million?
With how far Bitcoin has come, it is only a matter of time before it gets to a million. But for BTC to hit $1 million within the next decade, it would have to at least grow by 50% every year, which is not a big ask as it has done it over the last decade.
That said, for BTC to ever be worth that much, the store-of-value market has to keep growing at the 13% a year it has managed since 2004, since that is what takes it to $121 trillion and leaves room for Bitcoin to reach a $21 trillion market cap. And Bitcoin has to keep taking share from gold rather than settling at the 4% it holds today, which means the institutions holding gold moving huge money into Bitcoin instead.
