Summary
- Most lofty targets are based on the assumption that money will rotate out of gold and other assets and into bitcoin, but ignore opportunity cost. High yields on long-term U.S. Treasuries make non-yielding assets like bitcoin less attractive.
- Bitcoin’s price relative to the 30-year Treasury yield never made a new high in the 2025 bull run, unlike its dollar price.
- That ratio has now broken down through a multi-year support line, completing a bearish head-and-shoulders pattern.
The $1 million bitcoin call is back, again.
Asset manager Bitwise is the latest to predict that bitcoin could reach $1.3 million within a decade. This isn’t new territory. Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Block’s Jack Dorsey, and Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood have all stated versions of it before.
A closer look at bitcoin’s current price trajectory, adjusted for the “risk-free rate” of traditional finance, suggests these targets may be a little too ambitious.
The million-dollar forecast comes down mostly to one assumption: if bitcoin captures some modest slice of gold’s market cap, or if some other multi-trillion-dollar pool of capital, such as global pension funds, allocates capital to the cryptocurrency, the price skyrockets.
What most of these targets likely do not include is the opportunity cost.
Every dollar sitting in bitcoin is a dollar not earning the yield on U.S. Treasuries, the closest thing markets have to a risk-free return. And if Treasury yields offer attractive returns, as they are right now, will capital flow into bitcoin at a pace assumed by several analysts?
