Number Go Up Is Not The Point

• Price is not value
• The denominator matters
• A higher Bitcoin price may actually be telling you something frightening
• Number go up can become a psychological trap
• Collapse doesn’t reliably produce freedom
• When money dies, society changes
• The real Bitcoin insurance policy
• The $1 million Bitcoin question

There is something deeply strange about the way Bitcoin is discussed in most circles. An asset created as an alternative to fiat money is routinely celebrated according to how many units of fiat money it can command. Headlines like “Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high” are enough to inspire euphoric celebrations, with analysts across the digital divide publishing increasingly extravagant price targets. They’ll even go as far as to say that $500,000, $1 million or $10 million Bitcoin is inevitable. As if that were not enough, every politician, celebrity, hedge fund manager or central banker that says something vaguely positive about Bitcoin becomes another reason for excitement.

As you can see the entire conversation revolves around one question which is, how high can the price go? This way of thinking is problematic because the number is denominated in fiat. If Bitcoin’s fundamental proposition is that fiat money is structurally unsound, then treating the number of fiat units required to purchase one Bitcoin as the ultimate measure of Bitcoin’s success is a profound conceptual error.

§Price is not value

Value is subjective. Things do not possess some objective quantity of economic value embedded within them waiting to be discovered by a market. Individuals value things according to the ends they believe those things can help them achieve.

Prices emerge from human action and exchange. They are market signals produced by the interaction of subjective valuations, scarcity, preferences, expectations and available information. This distinction matters enormously when thinking about Bitcoin. When someone says, “Bitcoin is worth $100,000,” they are not describing an intrinsic property of Bitcoin. They are describing an exchange ratio between Bitcoin and the dollar at a particular moment.

The price tells us how many dollars the marginal buyer is willing to surrender for the marginal unit of Bitcoin, given the circumstances, expectations and alternatives available to participants in that market. The dollar is merely the measuring unit, and yet some Bitcoiners routinely confuse the measurement with the thing being measured. This is particularly dangerous because the monetary unit itself is not constant.

Imagine measuring someone’s height with a ruler that shrinks by 5 percent every year. Eventually, everyone would notice that something was wrong with the ruler. Yet when it comes to money, people routinely treat the monetary unit as though it were an immutable yardstick when it’s not. Money is itself an economic good, and its purchasing power is determined by market conditions.

Therefore, when Bitcoin rises from $50,000 to $100,000, several things could be happening simultaneously. Demand for Bitcoin may have increased. Bitcoin may have become more useful to its users. Expectations about its future purchasing power may have changed. The supply of dollars may have expanded. Confidence in the dollar may have weakened. The nominal price cannot tell us which of these forces is responsible by itself. This is why “number go up” is an incomplete description of what is happening.

§The denominator matters

Suppose one Bitcoin eventually trades for $1 million, most people would assume that Bitcoin has increased in value, however that conclusion does not follow automatically. The more important question is: What happened to the dollar?**

If the purchasing power of the dollar remained broadly stable and Bitcoin could suddenly command $1 million worth of goods and services, then Bitcoin’s real purchasing power would indeed have increased dramatically, but if the dollar has undergone a massive loss of purchasing power during the same period, a million-dollar Bitcoin would then mean something very different. The mistake is analogous to looking at a stock market rising in nominal terms during a period of severe currency debasement and concluding that society has necessarily become proportionally wealthier. Nominal numbers can rise while real economic conditions deteriorate. In other words, money is not wealth.

Money facilitates economic calculation, exchange and saving, but printing more monetary units does not magically create more capital, more food, more housing, more energy or more human ingenuity. You cannot manufacture prosperity by manufacturing claims on prosperity, yet this confusion persists everywhere.

When governments increase the quantity of money and financial assets rise people become richer on paper. As asset prices increase, politicos then point to nominal GDP as a measure of exceptional economic performance, but the underlying question remains; What happened to the purchasing power of the monetary unit? This is precisely why Bitcoin’s fiat price must be interpreted carefully. A rising BTC/USD price can represent Bitcoin becoming more valuable relative to the dollar, but it can also represent the dollar becoming less valuable relative to scarce assets, and sometimes it represents both.

§A higher Bitcoin price may actually be telling you something frightening

A $1 million BTC price would have many people celebrating their newfound wealth, but suppose that this occurs alongside a world in which food, energy, housing and basic necessities have become extraordinarily expensive in dollar terms because confidence in fiat money has deteriorated severely. Whilst Bitcoiners would have preserved their purchasing power the society around them would have collapsed in every meaningful way; with chaos and civil unrest being the likely result.

Would that really be the victory Bitcoiners think it is? If Bitcoin is $1 million but the purchasing power of ordinary people’s savings has collapsed, that is not necessarily evidence of a prosperous society. When a monetary system deteriorates badly enough, the consequences eventually appear in the real economy: shortages, unemployment, social instability, political extremism, capital destruction and the erosion of social trust.

This is why the idea that “Bitcoin going to $1 million” as inherently bullish misses the point. The number itself tells us almost nothing about whether humanity is better off. The relevant question is what happened to purchasing power, economic calculation, capital formation and human freedom.

§Number go up can become a psychological trap

If people enter Bitcoin solely because they expect the number to rise, Bitcoin becomes psychologically subordinated to fiat. The dollar remains the reference point and remains the unit of account. Ultimately the dollar remains the thing that determines whether Bitcoin has “performed.” Thus Bitcoin becomes psychologically defined by the monetary system it was supposed to replace..

This produces a strange phenomenon where someone can spend years “investing in Bitcoin” while never actually changing their relationship with money. They continue earning and saving fiat. They continue measuring their wealth in fiat, while depending upon fiat-denominated institutions. They simply own one additional asset whose fiat price they hope will rise.

There is nothing inherently wrong with profiting from Bitcoin’s appreciation but if that is the entirety of the proposition, then we have reduced a monetary revolution to a trade. The bigger opportunity is monetary transformation, where the goal is not merely to have more dollars because you owned Bitcoin but eventually to need fewer dollars because Bitcoin itself has become useful as money. That is a fundamentally different objective that the NgU mentality tends to obscure.

§Collapse doesn’t reliably produce freedom

Here is the part of the story that most people tend to ignore, which is that economic disorder does not generally make people more committed to individual liberty. More often, it produces the opposite, a state of emergency that comes with demands to “act now” and cries of government intervention from different sections of society..

Argentina’s serial currency crises are a great example of this. Each bout of severe inflation was followed not by a spontaneous embrace of sound money, but by capital controls, multiple official exchange rates, import restrictions, and expanding state intervention in the economy. These measures, which ironically did more harm than good, persisted for years and were broadly tolerated by a public more afraid of chaos than of the controls. Greece in 2015 showed a milder version of the same reflex, when bank runs and default fears were met almost immediately with capital controls and withdrawal limits, imposed with public support because the alternative felt worse. Frightened, desperate people facing shortages and collapsing savings do not reliably coordinate their way to more freedom; they hand the state a justification to intervene more, not less.

This isn’t a deterministic claim because political institutions, constitutional constraints, and culture all play a role in shaping the final outcome, and collapse doesn’t mechanically produce authoritarianism. If the dollar’s failure arrives as social chaos, the state’s response to that chaos will likely be martial law, surveillance, capital controls, restrictions on property, CBDCs and even a 21st century version of EO6102. At that point, merely owning Bitcoin is not enough. You need an economy capable of functioning around it, because economic collapse does not remain an abstract problem of bond markets and exchange rates. It eventually becomes a problem of food, housing, employment, property and survival.

§When money dies, society changes

Adam Fergusson’s account of Weimar, Germany in his book When Money Dies describes a society in which the destruction of the monetary unit did not simply make prices inconveniently higher. It transformed economic and social relationships. Goods became more important than nominal money. The distinction between being “wealthy” and being able to obtain food became increasingly meaningless.

By December 1923, one US dollar was worth approximately 4.2 trillion marks, and Germany had been pushed toward a barter-like economy in which goods such as food, fuel and clothing could become more meaningful stores of value than the currency itself. This is the point that is so often lost when inflation is discussed through percentages. Inflation is not fundamentally about numbers on a spreadsheet. It is about the destruction of economic calculation and time preference. Fergusson’s account is particularly powerful because it shows the human consequences of monetary collapse rather than merely describing the mechanics. 

This is what makes the Bitcoin question so much more important than “number go up.” Real wealth comes from production, capital accumulation, entrepreneurship, knowledge, technology and human cooperation, not from the creation of monetary units. Bitcoin cannot manufacture those things for us. What it can do is provide a monetary foundation that does not systematically undermine them through arbitrary monetary manipulation.That is the real promise.The question is not simply whether Bitcoin appreciates against fiat but whether there will already be an alternative monetary infrastructure available when the trust in fiat disappears.

§The real Bitcoin insurance policy

Perhaps the best way to understand this is to think of Bitcoin not simply as an investment but as a form of monetary insurance. Insurance is valuable precisely because you purchase it before the disaster. You do not wait until your house is burning to look for a fire policy. Likewise, the rational response to monetary fragility is not to wait until the monetary system is visibly collapsing before learning how to operate outside it.

Build beforehand. That does not require believing that the dollar will collapse tomorrow. It requires recognizing that the cost of building resilience before a crisis is dramatically lower than the cost of constructing it during one and if the extreme scenario never arrives, you have still built a more sovereign, resilient and censorship-resistant economic infrastructure; but if it does arrive, the difference could be enormous.

§The $1 million Bitcoin question

This brings us back to the original argument about number go up. If Bitcoin reaches $1 million because fiat has remained relatively stable and Bitcoin has genuinely acquired extraordinary purchasing power, that will be one story. However, if Bitcoin reaches $1 million because the world’s major fiat currencies have experienced severe monetary deterioration, it will be another.

Should the latter scenario occur alongside shortages, unemployment, political polarization and civil unrest, then celebrating the BTC/USD exchange rate may be missing the most important story entirely. The real question will be, What have you built that still works? Can you still trade with other human beings without requiring permission from an increasingly desperate state? 

A Bitcoin standard should therefore mean more than simply owning Bitcoin. It should mean progressively building economic relationships around Bitcoin itself. That is why building on a Bitcoin standard today matters. Bitcoin’s greatest value may not be that it makes its holders rich during the collapse of fiat. Its greatest value may be that it gives society an alternative before the collapse of fiat becomes a social crisis.

The goal should therefore not be to sit patiently waiting for the dollar price of Bitcoin to validate the thesis but to build the alternative while the old system still has enough stability to support its construction. The people who would have spent years building Bitcoin-native businesses, payment networks, communities and economic relationships will be in a fundamentally different position from those who merely accumulated Bitcoin and waited for the price to rise. The former would have built a functional economy while the latter would have merely accumulated a position on a price chart, with nothing in self custody.