Q1 2035—$10M Bitcoin
Two contrarian transformations driving bitcoin to $10M in 10 years.
I. Introduction: What This Letter Is
This is the first edition of The Mustard Seed, a quarterly letter focused on time arbitrage—analyzing where bitcoin, technology, and civilization will be in 10 years, with contrarian insights on markets and capital allocation. 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.
The theme of this quarter: Bitcoin at $10 million by 2035. What does it take for that to happen? And what are investors missing?
II. The Two Transformations Driving Bitcoin to $10M
1. The Great Flow of Capital
The global financial system stores $900 trillion in assets that are subject to dilution or devaluation. Bitcoin is the first and only monetary asset with a fixed supply—making it immune to both.
Cannot be diluted – No more than 21 million will ever exist.
Cannot be devalued – Economic systems converge on one best money to solve the problem of barter (the inefficiency of multiple monies).
Michael Saylor’s waterfall analogy provides a clear framework for understanding this newly discovered capital flow. 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:
Gold ($20T): Mined at 2% annually, eroding its scarcity. Dilution.
Real Estate ($300T): Supply is expanding at 2.4% annually.1 Dilution.
Equities ($110T): Profits attract competitors, eroding long-term profits. Devaluation.
Fixed Income & Fiat ($230T): Structurally designed to be inflated away. Dilution.
The more wealth stored in these traditional assets, the stronger the market incentive to dilute or devalue them, weakening their role as long-term stores of value. These assets will retain value, but their ability to preserve wealth over time is melting. After the discovery of bitcoin, this waterfall is now open, and capital is flowing into the only asset that cannot be diluted or devalued.
As traditional stores of value erode, bitcoin’s absolute scarcity becomes undeniable. Imagine Niagara Falls, thundering with 85,000 CFS (cubic feet per second) of water. But every four years, the flow is cut in half. At first, the reduction seems minor—just like bitcoin’s early halvings.
2009: Niagara Falls is at full power, and miners receive 50 BTC per block.
2025: The falls have slowed to 5,312 CFS, about the force of four Olympic swimming pools draining every second, while bitcoin’s block subsidy is 3.125 BTC.
2065: The once-mighty Niagara Falls is just a trickle, mirroring bitcoin’s final supply squeeze—with less than 0.001% of all bitcoin left to mine.
This is exponential scarcity in action. The decline feels slow at first, but before long, the flow dwindles to near zero—just like bitcoin’s supply. Most won’t realize how scarce it is until the last drops are gone.
How high can bitcoin go? Models attempting to quantify global bitcoin adoption provide useful benchmarks:
Power Law Model: Projects $1.8M per bitcoin by 2035.
Saylor’s Bitcoin24 Model: Suggests $2.1M per bitcoin by 2035.
However, these projections may be too conservative. They assume diminishing returns, but we live in a world of exponential technological and financial transformation.
To put this into perspective, if you took a normal Delta airplane to the Sun, it would take 19 years. But if you could fold a piece of paper 50 times, its thickness would reach the Sun. Humans struggle to grasp exponential growth, and bitcoin’s adoption curve follows a similar pattern—rapid expansion, reflexivity, and global recognition of its superior monetary properties could drive price appreciation far beyond current base-case models.
2. The Acceleration of Deflationary Technology
Exponential advances in AI, automation, and robotics are set to drastically increase the supply of goods and services, making them 5x, 10x, or even 50x more abundant. The deflationary effects of these technologies are already measurable and will only accelerate in the coming decade:
Manufacturing & Retail: AI-driven automation and 3D printing are revolutionizing production. Adidas' Speedfactories cut sneaker production times from months to days. As these technologies scale, manufacturing costs could drop 10x, making goods far more affordable.2
Housing: 3D-printed homes are already built 50x faster than traditional construction and at a fraction of the cost. With further automation and AI-driven supply chains, housing could become 10x cheaper, making homeownership vastly more accessible.3
Transportation: Autonomous ride-hailing fleets could make transportation 10x cheaper by removing driver costs and optimizing vehicle usage. A ride that costs $20 today could cost the equivalent of $2 in a world where self-driving fleets dominate.4
Food: AI-controlled vertical farms produce 400x more food per acre while using 95% less water, dramatically lowering costs. Robotic kitchens can already prepare meals with minimal human intervention. As automation scales, food costs could drop 5x, making high-quality meals incredibly affordable.5
Healthcare: AI diagnostics already outperform human doctors in detecting diseases, and robotic surgeons can operate with extreme precision. These advancements could make healthcare 10x cheaper over time as AI eliminates inefficiencies.6
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.
Under a fiat system, natural deflation is artificially suppressed through inflationary monetary and fiscal policies, forcing prices higher despite technological progress. Bitcoin removes this distortion, allowing true deflation to emerge—making wealth preservation and accumulation more powerful than ever before.
III. The Gold Thought Experiment: What If Supply Had Been Fixed?
Gold has been a store of value for thousands of years, and today, humanity holds $20 trillion worth of it. Since 1970, gold’s price has risen from $36 per ounce to $2,900 per ounce in 2025. While this may seem like substantial appreciation, gold’s supply has also expanded by 2% per year, steadily diluting its value over time.
This 2% annual increase has compounded over decades, meaning the total gold supply has grown by nearly 3x since 1970. Without this steady expansion in supply, gold’s scarcity would have been far greater, leading to a significantly higher price per ounce.
Gold’s historical Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over this period has been 8.3% per year. However, if gold’s supply had remained perfectly fixed—like bitcoin’s—and humanity still wanted to hold $20 trillion in gold today, its price would be $8,618 per ounce, leading to a higher CAGR of 10.5% per year.
A fixed supply and higher CAGR would have likely increased demand for gold far beyond $20 trillion. Investors seek the best-performing stores of value, and a truly scarce gold supply would have attracted even more capital. This highlights the fundamental advantage of bitcoin—absolute scarcity ensures that rising demand translates directly into price appreciation. With a fixed 21 million cap, bitcoin achieves what gold never could: a monetary system built on immutable perfect scarcity.
IV. The Time Arbitrage Opportunity
Why $10M Bitcoin is Not That Crazy
At $10M per BTC, bitcoin’s total value would be $200T, representing only 11% of total global wealth, assuming global wealth continues growing at 7% annually.
This means, on average, investors would allocate just 11% of their portfolios to bitcoin—a reasonable level for the best long term store of value asset.
Every past store of value has perpetually expanded in supply to meet demand. Bitcoin is the first that cannot.
The scale of bitcoin mining in this scenario underscores how natural this transition could be. By 2035, with block rewards at 0.78125 BTC per block, yearly miner revenue at $10M per bitcoin would reach $411 billion per year. Since bitcoin mining is a highly competitive industry, that means the market would need to absorb $411 billion in bitcoin sales annually just from mining.
For comparison, the global wine market was valued at $385 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $528 billion by 2030.7 If an industry as mundane as wine can sustain that level of global demand, then a financial asset with absolute scarcity reaching similar scale is entirely reasonable.
The Reality of Bitcoin Adoption: It’s Still Early
Many hear that 39% of the U.S. has some form of direct or indirect bitcoin exposure8—which might seem like broad adoption. But this number is misleading. It includes:
Direct holders of bitcoin
Investors in bitcoin-related equities (MSTR, COIN, GBTC, miners, ETFs)
Passive bitcoin exposure via index funds (Vanguard Total Stock Market, QQQ, etc.)
This broad definition makes it seem like bitcoin adoption is mature. In reality, very few people hold meaningful amounts of bitcoin.
A more telling metric:
The number of people worldwide with $100,000 or more in bitcoin is only 400,000.9
That’s 0.005% of the global population—just 5 in 100,000 people.
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. This is the real measure of how early we are.
Front-Running the Capital Migration
Most people today are fixated on bitcoin’s short-term volatility, distracted by daily price swings and hesitant to think beyond the immediate future. But true wealth isn’t built by reacting to noise—it’s built by understanding long-term structural shifts before they become obvious.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to replace money entirely. It only needs to absorb a meaningful percentage of global wealth to become the dominant savings technology. As long as bitcoin continues to function reliably and doesn’t break, its superior properties make this outcome highly likely.
The opportunity today is to arbitrage time—to allocate capital before the world fully appreciates what’s happening. 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.
See you in Q2.
— Joe Burnett
This letter is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or legal advice. Opinions expressed are my own and do not constitute recommendations. Always conduct your own research before making financial decisions.
Rough Estimate by ChatGPT 4o
Rough Estimate by ChatGPT 4o
Well written! The fold-paper-50-times example blew my mind. If a piece of paper is just a mm thick, that would still be over ten times the distance to the sun. Incredible.
It’s frustrating how little people realize just how much inflation has robbed them over the last decades and how much cheaper things should be with technological advancement. The combination of even more exponential technological progress with sound money is going to do incredible things for the world.
I wonder when Bitcoin will flip gold and what impact that will have. Will it go by with a whisper, or will it be a smack-in-the-face moment and cause a surge in demand for BTC? Can’t wait to see!
Looking forward to future editions!