As Q4 of 2023 approaches, many bitcoiners already have their sights set on 2024 and beyond.
And as the years go on, more and more people start to ask the same question once they learn about bitcoin:
“Am I too late to bitcoin?”
When a newcomer looks at the price, it’s easy to understand why they might feel that way. Paying tens of thousands of dollars – that most people don’t have sitting around – for a single bitcoin would probably sound crazy to any reasonable skeptic looking at it from a first glance.
But as many can agree, the Bitcoin rabbit hole goes deep. And the further you venture, the more you realize just how early 2024 is in the relative timeline of bitcoin’s trajectory.
A Very, Very Brief History of Bitcoin
Let’s take a walk down memory lane to familiarize ourselves with just how far bitcoin’s come over the past 15 years. The ball really began rolling just six days after the first Bitcoin block was mined on January 3rd, 2009.
January 9th, 2009
Satoshi publishes “Bitcoin v0.1 released.”
January 10th, 2009
The famous Hal Finney – who’s known to have worked “closely” with Satoshi on bitcoin – posts his famous “Running bitcoin” tweet:
Running bitcoin
— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
January 11th, 2009
Satoshi Nakamoto sends 10 BTC to the famous Hal Finney at 10:01 AM, marking the first transaction in bitcoin’s history.
Funny enough, just 21 minutes later at 10:22 AM, Finney posts an email to the same cryptography mailing list that Satoshi regularly interacted with, explaining his expectations for a $10 million bitcoin if proven to be successful:
What’s unfolded over the past decade and a half only further cements the ideas of Satoshi, Finney, and other core contributors who helped bitcoin grow its wings.
At this point however, despite slowly growing transaction volume, bitcoin still had yet to realize its vision as a real-world form of payment.
May 22, 2010
That is, until Laszlo Henyecz decided to spend 10,000 BTC on two pizzas on May 22nd, 2010, a $40 value at the time – that’s worth more than $260 million today.
And the price action following that historic day speaks for itself:
From this point on, bitcoin found its pulse. While many skeptics wait on the sideline for “evidence” of people using bitcoin as money, they overlook the fact that it already started happening 14 years ago.
Like The Internet, Like Bitcoin
Did you know that the internet took seven years to reach 1 million users? Bitcoin did it in just five years.
Did you know that bitcoin’s adoption curve today is outpacing the internet’s by almost double the rate?
Prior to the internet (and earlier information vessels like the printing press), trends took much longer to catch on, both socially and technologically. But today, someone can go viral overnight thanks to technology like TikTok.
The same applies to bitcoin. In the same amount of time it took for the internet to go from 130 million users to 1 billion users (7.5 years), this projection, based on bitcoin’s previous growth and data from on-chain analyst Willy Woo, estimates it’ll take bitcoin just 4 years. It makes total sense too, considering that we didn’t have the infrastructure to move information like we do with bitcoin prior to the internet – but even lack of internet isn’t holding bitcoin back.
Did you know that among the first things used on the internet when it went public was, unsurprisingly, adult content? In the realm of information, it becomes evidently obvious how one could use the internet to bypass former barriers to accessing certain information.
In the same fashion, it also became obvious how one could bypass former restrictions with bitcoin to buy certain products. Silk Road naturally caught on, and bitcoin became incredibly useful for facilitating its illegal online trade. Neither of these instances highlight flaws inherent with these technologies, but rather, they highlight the similarities in how people adopt new, open protocols.
Where Bitcoin Is Today
Today, people from every corner of the earth are using bitcoin in their financial lives, whether that’s by holding it to preserve their wealth, spending it to acquire goods and services, or receiving it to support their own business. However, its use is still limited as it hasn’t captured enough of the world’s mindshare, yet.
2024 may be a major validation year for bitcoin. While it doesn’t necessarily need the opinions of humanity to succeed as revolutionary technology, next year has the potential to speed up bitcoin’s adoption rate dramatically depending on what we see take place.
Regulation
Today, bitcoin is under close eye by virtually every country in the world. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a stack of several Bitcoin Spot Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) waiting on their desk for review. If approved, bitcoin will have the foundation laid to move into the mainstream financial portfolio as it begins flowing into people’s 401ks, pension funds, companies’ balance sheets, and more.
Across the ocean, major geopolitical players like China and Russia have been cozying up to bitcoin after previously holding strong opposition to it.
- China recently changed its tune on the digital asset space after a long history of banning bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulators are now building a financial path for the nations’ citizens to buy and hold bitcoin.
- Russia is actively mining bitcoin and repeatedly hints at plans to integrate digital asset trading into their financial system.
Meanwhile, only one nation in the world has adopted bitcoin as legal tender so far: El Salvador.
Takeaway: The fact that bitcoin is even being actively debated in the global geopolitical landscape points to how early it still is. A fully established, integrated, global monetary network wouldn’t be getting banned in countries, left unregulated by major financial and federal institutions, and generally disregarded, legally speaking.
Adoption
Beyond regulation, pure adoption adds perspective to where bitcoin is along its journey.
While El Salvador has taken the greatest leap forward to push adoption within its own country, the move has certainly come with heavy scrutiny from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), central banks, and others.
Despite that, the country continues to thrive, further showing just how devoid of impact the words and policies of authorities are in the face of actual technological innovation.
Bitcoin is also catching on in Argentina, Turkey, Lebanon, and Venezuela, four countries that have already all experienced new Bitcoin all-time highs (ATHs) relative to their rapidly inflating currencies. The fact that Bitcoin is already hitting ATHs against their local currencies highlights how dramatically their fiat currencies are eroding in value relative to stronger currencies like the US Dollar or Chinese Yuan.
Beyond these countries, you’d get a better answer asking which countries are not using bitcoin instead of which countries are.
Chainalysis provides a good heat map that indicates where Bitcoin adoption is most fervent (darker) compared to less (lighter).
Takeaway: Despite what regulations are in place, people all around the world are finding their way to bitcoin, no matter where they live or what infrastructure they have available to them.
Understanding Price Vs. Purchasing Power
Instead of trying to make sense of bitcoin’s violent up and down price swings that come with rapid adoption, pay attention to the floor price of bitcoin after every boom-and-bust cycle:
Or what about by simply looking at the opening price every year, on January 1st, since bitcoin’s inception?
From this perspective, bitcoin’s price may not appear so volatile. While it certainly can rise and fall, these charts visualize the underlying exponential growth bitcoin is experiencing right now.
Despite all these metrics, however, the price does not matter. What’s important is to look beyond price – look at purchasing power.
People often like to call bitcoin “number go up (NgU) technology.” But that phrasing actually misses the nuance of what bitcoin does.
“Number go up” is usually referred to in the context of bitcoin’s price. While technically it’s true that bitcoin’s price tends to go up over time, this phrasing gets misconstrued, leading people to think that bitcoin’s value is “increasing.” However, what’s really going on is that the currency being used to measure bitcoin’s value is decreasing.
When you hold bitcoin, or any other appreciating asset, your purchasing power is increasing relative to fiat’s devaluation. Of course, heavy buying and selling pressure in the short term can cause exacerbated fluctuations in bitcoin’s price, but the long term trends displayed in the aforementioned bar graphs highlight what’s really going on with fiat currency.
It’s not that bitcoin is becoming more valuable; It’s that fiat is becoming less valuable. The more that governments dilute the supply of fiat, the more units of fiat it will take to buy the same goods over time.
In this light, it’s better to think of bitcoin as “number go down technology.” As the network holds bitcoin, technological innovation distributes the efficiency gains in our production to holders through increased purchasing power. Today, the opposite occurs: Technology tries to drive costs down, but rapidly inflating fiat currencies work against those deflationary forces to keep prices artificially high.
Jeff Booth’s “The Price of Tomorrow” is an excellent book to expand on this concept.
So what does “increasing purchasing power” on a Bitcoin standard look like, then? An ever-growing bank account?
Not quite. It’s actually quite simple: prices of goods and services simply fall over time.
The Reality: You’re Never Late To Bitcoin
The big takeaway here is that you can’t necessarily be “late” to bitcoin – and that certainly isn’t the case in 2024.
Being “early” or “late” to bitcoin (or any asset) is a notion derived from a fiat monetary system that requires speculation in order to keep up. Investing should be a luxury, not a necessity, but due to loose monetary policy enacted by fallible humans, people are forced to invest their money into all different kinds of portfolio mixes to try and outrun fiat devaluation.
Instead, bitcoin proposes an alternative world that realigns our monetary system – where savings works for everyone, and no one needs to invest and take risk with their wealth if they prefer not to.
In a system like this, there is no being “early” or “late” to bitcoin. Bitcoin is simply money that retains your purchasing power. Nothing about that will ever change. Sure, buying BTC on exchanges today is certainly an “early” luxury that’s easier than only being able to work for it in the future, but either way, you’re still never late to bitcoin.
Final Thoughts
After everything discussed, it’s safe to say that you’re certainly not late to bitcoin in 2024.
Though bitcoin’s only been around for just under 15 years, gold has stuck around for over 2,600. The role that bitcoin is poised to play in our economy fundamentally resets and reframes our economic philosophy for the next 2,600 years at least. It creates new rules and incentives to follow that old incentives and outdated monetary thinking won’t be able to adapt to.
Bitcoin incentivizes positive economic interaction, breaking the death spiral of debt that our fiat system consistently falls victim to time and time again, and creating a positive feedback loop instead. Purchasing power gains from technological innovation get distributed to the decentralized Bitcoin network rather than the centralized 1%, thus creating a much more productive, efficient world. It’s the Cantillon Effect in reverse – the Nakamoto Effect.
This new economic foundation isn’t going anywhere. And as it stands right now, maybe 1% of the world holds bitcoin, and an even smaller percentage truly understands how it works.
Consider yourselves among those tiny percentages of people simply for just being here, reading this today.
FAQs About Being Late To Bitcoin In 2024
Q: When is a good time to buy Bitcoin?
A: It’s always an appropriate time to buy bitcoin, assuming you have the financial means to do so responsibly. As they say, never invest more than you’re willing to lose, and never take on more risk than you can comfortably tolerate. Trying to time the market to find an ideal entry is historically proven to be more risky than simply dollar-cost averaging over time.
Q: Is it worth it to buy bitcoin?
A: Buying bitcoin is worth it if you are struggling from the problem that bitcoin aims to solve. Understand that bitcoin is a vessel to escape fiat devaluation, and treat it as such. In this context, it’s absolutely worth it to buy and hold a responsible amount of bitcoin for your financial situation.
Thank You For Reading
If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it, supporting one of these affiliates, or making a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.