Here's What Would Need to Happen for Bitcoin to Flip Gold Someday

Today, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) has a market cap of roughly $1.4 trillion. Gold's market cap is about $36 trillion. There's thus a huge gap separating the world's most prominent digital asset, which some have called digital gold, and the precious metal that people have used as a store of value for millennia.

But just a handful of years ago, Bitcoin didn't even exist, and its incredible rise from oddity to mainstream asset is more than enough to make many investors wonder if it might one day match or even one-up gold. Let's explore whether that proposition is realistic and what would need to happen for it to occur.

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What Bitcoin would need to do

For Bitcoin to match gold's market cap today, its price would need to rise by more than 27 times from about $68,000 now to reach a value of nearly $1.9 million per coin. That number might sound unattainably high, but it isn't.

About 95% of the 21 million Bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined. Beyond that, an estimated 3 million to 4 million coins are permanently lost to forgotten passwords, destroyed hardware, or deceased owners. And, after its next halving, slated for 2028, only 1.5 bitcoins will be issued per 10-minute period, which means that its new supply will be throttled to a tiny trickle, with even slimmer issuance awaiting in the subsequent halvings, which occur about every four years.

So in terms of its scarcity, which is one of the big reasons the asset works as a store of value at all, Bitcoin's protocol ensures that its supply will never swamp the market.

What's more, a new cohort of buyers is looking to secure their allocation. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), corporate treasuries, governments, and digital asset treasury (DAT) companies have all been buying more of the coin than ever before since last year. ETFs (and thus ETF issuing companies) now hold 7% of Bitcoin's possible supply, whereas governments hold 2.5% and public companies have 5.1%. Those players all tend to be slow to sell once they invest.

And if the coin is ever going to flip gold, it would probably entail a years-long process where institutional buyers compete with each other as they seek to secure as much of the asset as possible, and refuse to sell it. Assuming the rate of adoption and its scarcity continue to confer it with the same price performance as in its past, the soonest that it might be worth $1.9 million per coin would be in early 2035, which would mean it would be worth more than gold. So there's a real path here.

But that's just a price projection based on historical data, and it doesn't take into account gold itself potentially becoming more valuable during the same period. On that front, gold is having a spectacular run of its own at the moment, trading above $5,160 per ounce after roughly doubling in the past year as investors bought it while flocking to safety amid mounting geopolitical and macroeconomic stresses.

Why "the flippening" is the wrong focus

Evaluating Bitcoin's odds of flipping gold is helpful because it forces you to understand exactly how tight its supply is going to be. In practice, there's no law that says Bitcoin and gold can't both do extremely well in the long term, and you might even want to hold both in your portfolio.

However, the risks facing Bitcoin are quite different from those facing gold, and they might make it impossible or much slower for its market cap to become bigger than that of the precious metal. If major economies, particularly China, never fully adopt Bitcoin, or decide to ban it, demand would be sharply constrained. Separately, if Bitcoin's cryptography is undermined somehow such that people's coins can get stolen, it might pulverize all trust in the asset until the issue is fixed.

So don't get too fixated on the coin's prospects of being worth more than gold someday. It has a path of its own, and so far, its fundamental properties have driven its price higher over time.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.