Bitcoin
Bitcoin reached a market capitalisation of $1.4 trillion in 2024 — larger than the M1 money supply of all but the top 10 economies. Network hash rate exceeds 600 exahashes per second, the global energy footprint sits at ~150 TWh/year, and US spot Bitcoin ETFs hold over 1 million BTC since the January 2024 SEC approvals.
Key insights
Mining is industrial-scale
Bitcoin mining migrated from CPUs (2009) to GPUs (2010) to FPGAs (2011) to ASICs (2013). Modern mining is dominated by industrial operations in low-electricity-cost regions: Texas, Kazakhstan, Russia, parts of Iran and Argentina. China was the dominant mining location until the 2021 ban; the network rebalanced in under 6 months. Total energy use is estimated at 150 TWh/year — comparable to Argentina's electricity consumption.
ETF approval was a structural shift
The January 2024 SEC approval of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs (BlackRock IBIT, Fidelity FBTC, ARK ARKB, Bitwise BITB, others) routed institutional flows into BTC for the first time at scale. Net inflows reached $58B in the first 18 months. IBIT became the fastest-ever ETF to reach $50B in AUM. The marginal buyer base shifted from retail/exchange-resident to long-horizon institutional via traditional brokerage.
Halvings shape the supply schedule
Bitcoin's protocol cuts the block reward (new coins minted per block) in half every 210,000 blocks (~4 years). Past halvings: 50→25 BTC (2012), 25→12.5 (2016), 12.5→6.25 (2020), 6.25→3.125 (April 2024). Each halving has historically been followed by a bull market — though the mechanism (reduced sell pressure from miners) is becoming smaller as the issuance share of total supply approaches zero (97.5% of all BTC has been mined by 2024).
Bitcoin annual closing price 2011–2024
USD, log scale appropriate
Key Finding: Three bull-bear cycles roughly aligning with halvings. The 2024 cycle was the first with ETF-driven institutional flows.
Bitcoin network hash rate 2014–2024
Exahashes per second (EH/s)
Key Finding: Hash rate has grown ~1000× over a decade. The temporary drop in mid-2021 reflects China's mining ban; recovery took 4 months.
Methodology & caveats
Supply cap and issuance
Bitcoin's protocol caps total supply at 21 million BTC. ~19.7 million are mined as of late 2024. The last BTC will be mined around 2140. Issuance halves every ~4 years, so over 99% of supply will be mined by 2050. After issuance ends, miners are compensated by transaction fees alone — whether fees scale to support network security is the central long-term open question.
Market cap is not 'wealth held'
Bitcoin market cap = current price × circulating supply. It overstates how much capital actually entered. 'Realized cap' (each coin valued at the price it last moved) is a closer proxy for capital base — typically 40–60% of market cap. Long-dormant coins (held since pre-2013) likely include lost wallets and the Satoshi-mined stash.
On-chain transparency
All Bitcoin transactions are public on the blockchain. Analytics firms (Chainalysis, Glassnode, Coin Metrics, Arkham) cluster addresses and label entities (exchanges, miners, ETFs, custodians). This produces metrics not available for traditional asset classes: % of supply that hasn't moved in 1+ years, exchange flows, miner reserves, OTC desk movements.