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“The magic of Bitcoin isn’t the transfer of money to someone 10,000 miles away – it is the transfer of money to someone 10,000 days away.”

- Michael Saylor

$67,965.42

Type “Bitcoin all-time high” into Google and most of the responses will be a suspiciously round $69,000, achieved in November 2021.

Many outlets cite lower numbers, however, and it's hard to say what’s correct. 

As long as we are measuring bitcoin in US dollars (which cannot be exchanged on-chain) there will be no definitive answer — who knows what someone somewhere agreed to pay someone else for a bitcoin sometime?

The all-time high in US dollars can only be recorded off-chain, and the off-chain source most often cited for the mythical $69,000 is Coinbase.

As of this writing, however, Coinbase itself says the all-time high is $67,965.42 — which was today! 

That, too, is unofficial: There is no “closing” price for bitcoin even on Coinbase, because bitcoin never closes.

The real all-time high, then, is whatever we collectively imagine it to be — and what we’ve collectively imagined it to be is $69,000.

This is perfect because bitcoin, being a meme, is only worth what we imagine it’s worth — and what better number to imagine than a number (69) that is itself a meme? 

Now consider as well that the upcoming halving is likely to happen on 4/20, another meme number (yes, these meme numbers are all very juvenile), and these new all-time highs start to feel like destiny.

Were new highs inevitable? Were they inevitable now?

Probably less than people would have you think.

Why now?

In hindsight, it seems obvious that ETF inflows would push us to new highs — but this morning’s new highs come directly after the first big outflows from ETFs.

Bitcoin ETFs lost $140 million on Friday, which makes today seem like a not-so-obvious time to make new highs.

It’s also not at all obvious why the all-time highs should be this year.

Real interest rates are unusually positive in the US — the risk-free interest rate on US dollars is a full three percentage points above the rate of inflation, which means the US dollar is currently a deflationary asset.

Three points of deflation is a lot! 

In fact, real rates are the highest they’ve been in Bitcoin’s entire existence — the last time rates were this positive was 2008, just before the Great Financial Crisis that inspired Satoshi to write his legendary white paper. 

Rates are likely to stay real.

The big story in macro over the last few weeks has been that rates will be higher than we thought for longer than we thought — which should be bad news for bitcoin.

It’s not obvious why it hasn’t been.

The whole point of bitcoin was to offer an alternative to the inflationary dollar, so why would bitcoin be more popular than ever when the dollar is more deflationary than ever?

The answer might be that people are thinking longer-term — although that, too, is non-obvious.

Rising US deficits are a concern, of course, but not any more so than previously — if people were really worried about US deficits, they’d be switching into euros, francs and yen. 

They’re not — the US dollar is near a 20-year high against major currencies.

If people were worried about all fiat currencies, they’d be switching into gold. 

They’re not doing that either — the price of gold is barely keeping pace with inflation.

So what else could it be? 

Maybe it’s the tech that people are getting increasingly excited about.

But bitcoin dominance (its share of the entire crypto market cap) is nearing a three-year high, which suggests people are not particularly excited about crypto tech in general.

Even crypto people are not particularly excited about crypto tech, as deftly articulated by the title of Travis Kling’s 2024 bull case for crypto: "A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything."

You might argue that there is more optimism about bitcoin tech specifically and, yes, there is growing excitement around Ordinals and Bitcoin layer-2s. 

But that is a very niche interest. Anyone who can get excited about something like BitVM was surely already excited about bitcoin — incremental changes to Bitcoin tech are unlikely to make many incremental buyers of bitcoin.

Rising prices are surely not about rising utility, either: With the Lightning Network looking like a failed experiment, Satoshi’s original vision of bitcoin as a means of exchange is further away than ever.

Others cite rising geopolitical risk as a reason to buy bitcoin — but equities wouldn’t also be making all-time highs if investors were really worried about it.

Or maybe bitcoin is simply over my head.

Balaji’s explanation of the “purpose of Bitcoin” borders on satire for me, for example, but maybe others find it convincing?

Even so, financial markets are not big on nuance — investors like elevator pitches, not philosophy papers, so I can’t imagine anyone is buying bitcoin ETFs in an effort to “defund the secret police.”

Or maybe it’s something else: Reddit putting bitcoin on its balance sheet, or Fidelity recommending a 2% allocation (in Canada), or the prospect of a more crypto-friendly White House in 2025 or some government that’s secretly buying.

But these explanations, even all together, seem too small to be explanatory to me.

$67,000 per bitcoin is a big price that demands a big, simple explanation. 

So here’s mine: The meme is spreading.

At $30, $40, or even $50,000, the price of bitcoin was simply too low relative to the mindshare it’s achieved.

That may seem obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't — memes are unpredictable, as evidence by how few of them truly catch on.

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.

Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments. 

Bitcoin is going up because the meme is infecting more of those people — and when it makes headlines by breaking the “all-time high” of $69,000, it will infect even more of them.

― Byron Gilliam

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