It should be noted that the most popular trend in the Bitcoin network right now is NFT tokens. Their peculiarity is in attaching a text, image or video to a certain satoshi – the smallest indivisible part of the cryptocurrency, equal to 0.00000001 BTC. Such activity loads the blockchain and results in higher transaction fees.

According to the Dune platform, there are now more than 76,000 NFTs in the BTC blockchain. The current record for their generation was set on February 9, when just under 21,000 new NFTs appeared in a day. The most popular among them are images.

Rates of NFT creation in the Bitcoin network

Along with this, the cryptocurrency is becoming more and more popular. As noted by analysts Glassnode, the number of BTC-addresses with a non-zero balance the day before for the first time exceeded the mark of 44 million units. Moreover, experts attribute such activity to the popularity of NFT.

Number of Bitcoin addresses with non-zero balance

BTC itself appears to be more stable. The increasing correlation of the first cryptocurrency with gold speaks in favor of it. After all, the precious metal is well known for its ability to retain value.

Bitcoin’s correlation with gold

When will Bitcoin rise

The head of Blockstream noted that from January 2013 to December 2022, the price of Bitcoin rose at an average rate of 2.036 times a year, a rise of 1,200 times over the entire decade. If the trend continues, Bitcoin will already reach a value of $10 million per coin in the next two halving cycles, according to Cointelegraph. At the same time, its capitalization will rise to $200 trillion.

It should be noted that this trend does not have to be repeated at all. Yes, Bitcoin showed incredible growth in its early days, but now the cryptocurrency has become much more popular. Accordingly, the growth in the number of BTC investors now does not affect its value as much as it did a notional ten years ago. So Adam Beck's prediction may not even come close to becoming a reality - and that wouldn't be surprising.

The global rise in the price of Bitcoin

200 trillion is a big number, Beck admits. Here’s his quote.

$200 trillion is Hal Finney’s prediction of Bitcoin’s capitalisation back in 2009. That’s a lot, in which case Bitcoin displaces much of the capital in the bond markets, real estate, gold, equities and so on. Some believe that Bitcoin’s adoption will slow down, and that derivatives reduce its volatility.

Ratio of active Bitcoin users to total number of people

Hal Finney is one of the first Bitcoin developers who collaborated with Satoshi Nakamoto himself and got his first BTC transaction from him. In the forecast mentioned by Beck, Finney suggests that the cryptocurrency would rise in value to $10 million if it became the dominant payment system worldwide.

In this case, BTC can hardly claim that title. This is due to the limited scalability of this blockchain, which can still only handle 6-7 transactions per second. Of course, there are second-tier networks based on Bitcoin's main blockchain, such as the Lightning Network, but they are not very popular. The Lightning network is mostly used by dedicated BTC fans who, for whatever reason, ignore faster modern blockchains like Solana.

Bitcoin fans

That said, Beck noted that in order to achieve the aforementioned figure, improvements to Bitcoin’s tier 2 technology and wallet infrastructure need to be accelerated to allow time for innovation to scale. Here’s his rejoinder.

I think things will get “interesting” over the next two halves. Events will unfold quickly, we don’t have much time to scale technology. We need room for the next billion users to have their own UTXOs, private keys and censor-resistant cold wallets.

In the cryptocurrency niche, it is common to associate stages of coin market growth with BTC halvings, which occur once every approximately four years. Generally, this interval is enough for the niche to grow and then collapse, so for convenience investors plan a new bullpen with this event in mind.

Responding to one of the comments in the thread, Beck also admitted that the developers of BTC have so far “completely failed to make Bitcoin a convenient financial instrument”. He continues.

The field of making cryptocurrency into a financial instrument remains immature, almost untouched. Bitcoin-based structured products, real estate-backed mortgages, BTC-backed interest and other instruments could make crypto more user-friendly for more people.

Blockstream head Adam Back

However, there is one pitfall here – Bitcoin’s volatility. The price of the cryptocurrency changes too quickly for it to be successfully integrated into traditional financial services. A reduction in volatility will be possible due to the growth of BTC users, but there is still a long way to go before full adoption – only up to two per cent of people in the world are actively using crypto right now.


We believe that such a prediction is completely detached from reality, and Bitcoin at $10 million may never happen at all. As noted, the cryptocurrency had a much easier time growing in its early days. If we compare BTC's peaks in 2021 and 2017, the difference between them will be almost 3.5 times, which means that the growth rate of BTC is not so impressive anymore. Perhaps the situation will be remedied by developers who will think less about the value of the digital asset and instead work on the ease of interacting with it.


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