🐛 Early bird

Last week, we sent an email that might’ve made you feel impossibly late to Bitcoin.

Let’s undo that feeling. 

If you’re after proof of your earliness, look no further than the novelty factor in Bitcoin’s narratives — corporate treasuries and strategic reserves being the latest.

Give us the one thing more valuable than BTC: your opinion.

We’ve put together a quick form to help us get to know you and understand what matters most — what you want more of, less of, and whether our content is hitting or missing the mark.

And, if you complete the survey, you'll get entered for a chance to win some bitcoin merch to show off your love of BTC this summer.

I’m not here to make the case that nation states and multibillion-dollar companies buying bitcoin is not a big deal.

El Salvador adopting BTC as legal tender will go down in history as one of the most significant events in finance, modern or otherwise, regardless of how it ended. Bhutan’s harnessing of its bountiful hydropower capacity to mine bitcoin is equally momentous. 

So is Michael Saylor and (Micro)Strategy’s toppling of the first corporate domino, when it bought $250 million bitcoin in 2020. Square (now Block) and Tesla quickly followed, then a few firms across Asia, and then a few more in the US. Now, companies are announcing new treasury strategies every other day.

Almost half a decade later, one portal counts 74 public stocks with at least some bitcoin on their balance sheets, totaling 764,070 BTC ($86.1 billion), or almost 4% of the circulating supply. (Strategy makes up over three quarters of the whole.)

And then there’s the two-and-a-half dozen ETFs and other funds with 1.39 million BTC ($148.7 billion), or over 6.6% of the coins in existence, most of it belonging to BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale. 

Obviously, the price of bitcoin has jumped alongside each leap of adoption in the past five years: major corporations, sovereigns, asset managers and then back to corporations of all sizes, including SPACs.

Bitcoin is up almost 10x since Strategy’s first buy, 3x since Nayib Bukele announced the Bitcoin Law, and nearly 2.5x since the SEC approved ETFs for trading.

At this point, and however unintuitive, the supply of bitcoin could be more decentralized than it has ever been, even if more of it is owned by centralized entities than ever before.

Wasn’t this meant to make you feel early to Bitcoin? 

There are plenty of reasons to be confident about the price of bitcoin. I’ll leave it to others to amplify them, but if your yardstick for “earliness” is based on your entry point to BTC, then I’m afraid it’s all relative. You’re always earlier than some but later than others.

Here’s an alternative view: We’re all early to Bitcoin until the novelty wears off.

First, it was crime. The media loved crypto crime stories — because they soaked up traffic. But on a long enough timeline, all crime will be “crypto crime,” and related headlines have been passé for years already.

News of corporate bitcoin treasuries is destined to go the same way. As will word of sovereign funds, governments, altcoins and pensions buying bitcoin. Maybe religious institutions will come next, or Ivy League universities. Record labels and movie studios, public and private. Elementary schools and mom and pops.

As Bitcoin eats the world, each wave of adoption will feel like a novelty, until it isn’t. Only then will I happily agree that we’re no longer early.

— David

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• Strategy bought 10,100 BTC for $1.05 billion last week, bringing its total to 592,100 BTC. All-time average purchase price: $70,666.

• Capitulate: Charles Hoskinson has pitched converting $100 million ADA for BTC to boost Cardano’s treasury.

• There are now 2,682 public nodes (12.3%) running alternative client Knots, which filters some transactions with extra data by default, up from 1,928 (9%) this time last month.