Bitcoin to $10 Million? Experts See a Waterfall of Wealth 🌊💰

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In a new publication titled The Mustard Seed, Joe Burnett—Director of Market Research at Unchained—paints a grand vision where Bitcoin soars to $10 million per coin by 2035. This inaugural quarterly letter takes a long, contemplative gaze into the future, focusing on “time arbitrage” as it maps out the potential trajectory of Bitcoin, technology, and human civilization.

Burnett’s thesis hinges on two pivotal transformations: the “Great Flow of Capital” into an asset with absolute scarcity, and the “Acceleration of Deflationary Technology” as AI and robotics reshape entire industries. It’s like watching a river carve its path through a canyon, slowly but surely, until the landscape is forever changed.

Most economic commentary fixates on the next earnings report or the immediate price volatility. In contrast, The Mustard Seed announces its mission with clarity: “Unlike most financial commentary that fixates on the next quarter or next year, this letter takes the long view—identifying profound shifts before they become consensus.”

At the heart of Burnett’s outlook is the observation that the global financial system, with its roughly $900 trillion in total assets, faces ongoing risks of “dilution or devaluation.” Bonds, currencies, equities, gold, and real estate each have expansionary or inflationary components that erode their store-of-value function:

  • Gold ($20 trillion): Mined at approximately 2% annually, increasing supply and slowly diluting its scarcity.
  • Real Estate ($300 trillion): Expands at around 2.4% per year due to new development.
  • Equities ($110 trillion): Company profits are constantly eroded by competition and market saturation, contributing to devaluation risk.
  • Fixed Income & Fiat ($230 trillion): Structurally subject to inflation, which reduces purchasing power over time.

Burnett describes this phenomenon as capital “searching for a lower potential energy state,” likening the process to water cascading down a waterfall. In his view, all pre-Bitcoin asset classes were effectively “open bounties” for dilution or devaluation. Wealth managers could distribute capital among real estate, bonds, gold, or stocks, but each category carried a mechanism by which its real value could erode.

Enter Bitcoin, with its 21-million-coin hard cap. Burnett sees this digital asset as the first monetary instrument incapable of being diluted or devalued from within. Supply is fixed; demand, if it grows, can directly translate into price appreciation. He cites Michael Saylor’s “waterfall analogy”: “Capital naturally seeks the lowest potential energy state—just as water flows downhill. Before bitcoin, wealth had no true escape from dilution or devaluation. Wealth stored in every asset class acted as a market bounty, incentivizing dilution or devaluation.”

As soon as Bitcoin became widely recognized, says Burnett, the game changed for capital allocation. Much like discovering an untapped reservoir far below existing water basins, the global wealth supply found a new outlet—one that cannot be augmented or diluted.

To illustrate Bitcoin’s unique supply dynamics, The Mustard Seed draws a parallel with the halving cycle. In 2009, miners received 50 BTC per block—akin to Niagara Falls at full force. As of today, the reward dropped to 3.125 BTC, reminiscent of halving the Falls’ flow repeatedly until it is significantly reduced. In 2065, Bitcoin’s newly minted supply will be negligible compared to its total volume, mirroring a waterfall reduced to a trickle.

Though Burnett concedes that attempts to quantify Bitcoin’s global adoption rely on uncertain assumptions, he references two models: the Power Law Model which projects $1.8 million per BTC by 2035 and Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin model which suggests $2.1 million per BTC by 2035. He counters that these projections might be “too conservative” because they often assume diminishing returns. In a world of accelerating technological adoption—and a growing realization of Bitcoin’s properties—price targets could overshoot these models significantly.

A second major catalyst for Bitcoin’s upside potential, per The Mustard Seed, is the deflationary wave brought on by AI, automation, and robotics. These innovations rapidly increase productivity, lower costs, and make goods and services more abundant. By 2035, Burnett believes global costs in several key sectors could undergo dramatic reductions.

Adidas’ “Speedfactories” cut sneaker production from months to days. The scaling of 3D printing and AI-driven assembly lines could slash manufacturing costs by 10x. 3D-printed homes already go up 50x faster at far lower costs. Advanced supply-chain automation, combined with AI logistics, could make quality housing 10x cheaper. Autonomous ride-hailing can potentially reduce fares by 90% by removing labor costs and improving efficiency.

Burnett underscores that, under a fiat system, natural deflation is often “artificially suppressed.” Monetary policies—like persistent inflation and stimulus—inflate prices, masking technology’s real impact on lowering costs.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, would let deflation “run its course,” increasing purchasing power for holders as goods become more affordable. In his words: “A person holding 0.1 BTC today (~$10,000) could see its purchasing power increase 100x or more by 2035 as goods and services become exponentially cheaper.”

To illustrate how supply growth erodes a store of value over time, Burnett revisits gold’s performance since 1970. Gold’s nominal price from $36 per ounce to roughly $2,900 per ounce in 2025 appears substantial, but that price gain was continuously diluted by the annual 2% increase in gold’s overall supply. Over five decades, the global stock of gold almost tripled.

If gold’s supply had been static, its price would have hit $8,618 per ounce by 2025, according to Burnett’s calculations. This supply constraint would have bolstered gold’s scarcity, possibly pushing demand and price even higher than $8,618.

Bitcoin, by contrast, incorporates precisely the fixed supply condition that gold never had. Any new demand will not spur additional coin issuance and thus should drive the price upward more directly.

Burnett’s forecast for a $10 million Bitcoin by 2035 would imply a total market cap of $200 trillion. While that figure sounds colossal, he points out that it represents only about 11% of global wealth—assuming global wealth continues to expand at a ~7% annual rate. From this vantage point, allocating around 11% of the world’s assets into what The Mustard Seed calls “the best long-term store of value asset” might not be far-fetched. “Every past store of value has perpetually expanded in supply to meet demand. Bitcoin is the first that cannot.”

A key piece of the puzzle is the security budget for Bitcoin: miner revenue. By 2035, Bitcoin’s block subsidy will be down to 0.78125 BTC per block. At $10 million per coin, miners could earn $411 billion in aggregate revenue each year. Since miners sell the Bitcoin they earn to cover costs, the market would have to absorb $411 billion of newly mined BTC annually.

Burnett draws a parallel with the global wine market, which was valued at $385 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $528 billion by 2030. If a “mundane” sector like wine can sustain that level of consumer demand, an industry securing the world’s leading digital store of value reaching similar scale, he argues, is well within reason.

Despite public perception that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream, Burnett highlights an underreported metric: “The number of people worldwide with $100,000 or more in bitcoin is only 400,000
 that’s 0.005% of the global population—just 5 in 100,000 people.”

Meanwhile, studies might show around 39% of Americans have some level of “direct or indirect” Bitcoin exposure, but this figure includes any fractional ownership—such as holding shares of Bitcoin-related equities or ETFs through mutual funds and pension plans. Real, substantial adoption remains niche. “If Bitcoin is the best long-term savings technology, we would expect anyone with substantial savings to hold a substantial amount of bitcoin. Yet today, virtually no one does.”

Burnett emphasizes that the road to $10 million does not require Bitcoin to supplant all money worldwide—only to “absorb a meaningful percentage of global wealth.” The strategy for forward-looking investors, he contends, is simple but non-trivial: ignore short-term noise, focus on the multi-year horizon, and act before global awareness of Bitcoin’s properties becomes universal. “Those who can see past the short-term volatility and focus on the bigger picture will recognize bitcoin as the most asymmetric and overlooked bet in global markets.”

In other words, it is about “front-running the capital migration” while Bitcoin’s user base is still comparatively minuscule and the vast majority of traditional wealth remains in legacy assets.

At press time, BTC traded at $83,388.

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2025-03-17 11:16