Possible Future of Bitcoin

By: The BitLog Team | Last update: Aug. 2025 | 3 min read

The following is pure extrapolation. Proceed with caution...
Also, we recommend reading other articles on this website prior to continuing here.

We can make modest predictions about the future of bitcoin, based on the assumption that price behaves like a powerlaw, driven by network growth.

By current estimates, 5% or a little less (200-400 million) of the world's population owns bitcoin (as of Apr. 2025). The powerlaw trend may slow down or end today, or it may continue further until the network encompasses a significant fraction of the world's population. How much is a significant fraction? It may vary a lot.

The following table explores possible cut-off dates for the powerlaw trend and associated price increases relative to today. We assume a total bitcoin adoption of 50% of the world's population as a ceiling.

Recall that price should increase roughly like the number of users squared, so that modest increases in network size may lead to larger increases in price.

Below we plot the bitcoin market cap (total value of all owned bitcoin), compared with the total printed us dollars in circulation, the total us stock market cap, and the total money in us banks.

As long as the bitcoin price increases like a powerlaw, the market cap will roughly do the same.

We learn that if the powerlaw continues for a few more years, bitcoin market cap will be comparable to the total us printed money.

In the (perhaps unlikely) scenario that bitcoin price multiplies 100-fold, the market cap will then be comparable to the us stock market cap and perhaps the total money held in us banks.

Carbon Footprint

We find that the bitcoin carbon footprint scales like a powerlaw in time as well. Incidentally the increase in time is to the power of 5.5, similar to the increase in price.

To our knowledge, the observation that bitcoin's carbon footprint scales like a powerlaw in time hasn't been made before.

Below is a chart of bitcoin and world carbon emissions extrapolated to the future. Note that there is significant uncertainty regarding the data, on the order of a factor of 3 (or perhaps more).
We mark the same price increase dates as before for comparison.

Below is a table summary of the extrapolation, showing also the fraction of future total emissions represented by bitcoin. Depending on when bitcoin growth ends, it may become a significant fraction of total emissions.