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Recently Saylor released a prediction that Bitcoin would be "13 Million" by 2045 so in around ~20 years. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-saylor-predicts-13-million-223000728.html
  • “At Bitcoin's current price around $65,000, it's got a market cap of $1.3 trillion, or just 0.1% of all global wealth,” Saylor said. “For Bitcoin to get to my base case of $13 million in 2045 would require an annual rate of return of 29%. At that level, Bitcoin would have a market cap of $280 trillion and account for 7% of global wealth.”
I personally don't think this is unreasonable, if indeed Bitcoin is the only serious candidate for "money over IP" that's neutral, global, Proof-of-Work and highly secure. We all use the internet every day for information, why not Bitcoin for value storage + transactions?
So assuming that's true... and assuming a certain 'inflation rate' over the next 20... what are these Sats "worth" in purchasing power?

First of all, what is "13 million" in 2025 Dollars? The higher the assumed "inflation rate" over the next 20 years... the more conservative the estimate. The more 'inflation' the less 13 million would be worth 'today' in today's dollars due to fiat depreciation.
So let's take 3%, well above the Fed's mandate.
Therefore in 20 years, 1$ of today's dollars is worth ~1.81$ in 2045 dollars. You need 1.81$ in 2045 to buy as much 'stuff' as 1$ buys you today.
So 1.81(x)= 13,000,000 or x = 7,182,320.44198895 so to be conservative let's say that 13 million in 2045 is around... 7.1 million today.
7,100,000 per Bitcoin in today's Dollars in the year 2045...

7,100,000 / 84,100 is ~84.42 so let's say 84x appreciation (over 20 years).
Another way of saying this is (100,000,000 Sats / 7,100,000 $) or... 14.08450704 Sats/Dollar in today's dollars by the year 2045.
To make it easy (as a thought experiment) let's round it to ~14 Sats / Dollar.
So 14 Sats "buys you" One Dollar worth of stuff in today's Dollars in 20 years time.
That means that 100,000 Sats is worth... ~ 7100$ WHAT
Or in other words 500,000 Sats which currently goes for ~421$ is worth... 35,511$ WHAT?
(in today's dollars in today's purchasing power)

That means .01 Bitcoin or a million Sats (a relatively small amount) going for ~841$ today is worth...
~71,022 Dollars 🤯 (In today's dollars) 🤯🤯🤯
These numbers are mind-boggling.
10,000,000 Sats (.1 BTC) going for ~8400$ today = ~710,227 $ so well over 700,000 $ (in today's dollars) 🤯 of purchasing power.
A Stacker who stacks 200,000 sats on STACKER NEWS is stacking... over 14,000$ on a website?
Like I said these numbers are insane. If Saylor believes this no wonder he is buying as much as he can.

I don't need to do the math for you (at ~14.08 sats / dollar) but...
100 sats to post is 7$ LOL. 1,000 Sats Stacked is 71$ LOL (that's 84 cents today...)
These numbers are insane. Sending 50,000 sats over lightning (not a big deal today) which you commonly do at Bitrefill for a gift card... is ~3500 Dollars?
150$ of Bitcoin buys you today 178359 Sats or... over 12,500$ of Purchasing Power? This would be like the greatest investment / savings method of all time.
500$ buys you 594,530 Sats today or (@ 14.08 Sats/Dollar) 42225$ WHAT
These numbers are nuts.
A 380k post "boost" on Stacker News 'costs' ~ 320$. At the 14.08 Sats/$ exchange rate that's... 26988$ 😂😂😂💣💣💣
$13 million per Bitcoin is definitely on the higher end of estimates.
Using a MV = PY model of Bitcoin valuation assuming Bitcoin subsumes all the world's transactions, I only calculated a $3.4 million per Bitcoin price (in today's dollar valuations)... see #49434
An academic article I also wrote about (#745057) gave estimates in the $47,000 to $1.3 million range.
I don't exactly know where Saylor is getting his estimates, but it looks like he's assuming that Bitcoin subsumes all the world's asset value. I'm not sure what I think about that... I don't know if that model makes sense. Maybe it does, I just have to think about it more.
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I don't think it's all the asset value, just the monetary premia being enjoyed by other assets.
See my highest ranked post for a discussion of a simulator that runs through these different scenarios: #474759
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I'll look into it more, however Saylor is definitely assuming value storage in addition to transactions. 7% of global wealth in 'Bitcoin'. In other words 93% not in Bitcoin at all. He puts a big premium on the 'quality' and counter-party risk reduction of bitcoin value storage... plus the security.
Even if the reality is 50% of what he predicts... it's pretty cool
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The only stat that matters to me is 1 sat = 1 sat
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LOL another garbage post about saylor and btc price etc...
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You still need to do some sort of deflator to get present discounted value. Otherwise, you're not accounting for opportunity cost.
I love these kinds of exercises, though. See #474759, for one of mine.
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Thank you. I like the Nakamoto Portfolio / Estimator I mentioned it in a post a while back...
Like you were saying it's mostly about 'value storage' but medium of exchange adds a tremendous amount of value too.
Where else / how else can I securely send fractions of a penny to random strangers on the internet at all hours of the day and night? And swap those pennies into cold storage that's super secure? No other 'asset' or 'system' does this and in my opinion that adds way more value than people are giving it credit for.
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From the various approaches I've seen and tried, I like the ballpark figure of $1M for the best current valuation of bitcoin.
It's especially nice because sat-cent parity is very easy to think about. If we start getting closer to that, I'll try to revise my estimates.
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Makes sense.
I still believe we'll get "youtube lightning" one day (in the next 10 years)
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That's the one I want so badly. I have some hopes for Rumble getting us partway there, but we'll see.
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Lightning is like drugs once you get it working (as a figure of speech of course)
The world will love it
You are all thinking in terms of fiat.
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Not fiat. Purchasing power. Which isn't unreasonable in my opinion.
It's not unreasonable to imagine what 'this stuff is worth' once the informational asymmetry goes away, which it will eventually.
If all the world's companies and consumers and businesses were nearly as crazy about Bitcoin as the Stackers are today... what is a sat worth?
And if it's anywhere near Saylor's projections then the amount of 'value' being sent/received on Stacker News is considerable. Much less Lightning in general.
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The other way to express your answer is just to say that bitcoin's purchasing power will be whatever multiple of its current level.
The dollar value is just an intuitive measuring stick for most of us.
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It is, but l feel everyone knows fiat will become obsolete in the future. So we need to move forward.
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My opinion? ...
Fiat will never go away completely. Instead a parallel system will develop. Today most of the world speaks English. It's the 'universal language' mostly. But individual languages and cultures don't go away.
Bitcoin is like that - it's the 'universal language' when you need one, but it doesn't remove the need or appeal for region-specific languages. Region-specific fiats, monetary networks, and region-specific payment methods will probably always be there...
But Bitcoin will be there when you need something to work no matter the cost across these borders and potentially over long time periods.
Just my opinion.
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I don't quite believe that, but I think they may linger longer than most of us would expect.
The number of spoken languages is still declining and English is still gobbling up language share, so we don't know what the equilibrium condition will be. However, we do know that everyone hasn't just adopted English as soon as possible.
That's true. There's a bit of tension between clarity and breaking the habit.
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Im not trying to say everyone is wrong. Just that it might be good to start changing our mindset.
Honestly, I don’t think Saylor’s prediction is as crazy as it seems at first glance. Bitcoin has already proven to be the best-performing asset of the past decade, and if it truly becomes the foundation of a neutral global monetary system, who knows?
The real question is: Will this actually happen? If BTC truly establishes itself as "money over IP," then $13 million per unit wouldn’t be a random number but a natural consequence of mass adoption and the flight of value from traditional financial systems. Today, everyone uses the internet to find information—why not use Bitcoin to store value and transact globally? It makes sense.
But I also see the other side. This kind of growth would require a 29% annual appreciation for two decades, which is insane. Bitcoin has had exponential growth spurts before, but the bigger it gets, the harder it is to sustain that curve. Not to mention that governments might try to regulate it, other technologies could emerge, and Bitcoin’s own volatility could prevent it from being used as an everyday currency.
Now, if this does happen and Bitcoin truly moons, what does that mean for Satoshis? Well, in Saylor’s scenario, 1 satoshi would be worth 13 cents. That doesn’t sound like much, but today, 1,000 sats buy you a piece of gum, and in that hypothetical future, they could pay for a meal. The problem is: what about inflation? If the world undergoes financial collapse and traditional money gets diluted into nothing, then Bitcoin might grow massively in absolute numbers but without a real increase in purchasing power.
I do think Bitcoin has a bright future and could capture a huge share of global wealth, but setting an exact price for 2045 is just a guess. I’d rather believe that holding BTC long-term is likely a winning move, but maybe not as extreme as Saylor projects.
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I tried to address some of these here... Sorry it's a long read
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