The full version of this newsletter was originally published on lynalden.com. During the past year or so, the Bitcoin ecosystem has largely been led by the rise of corporate bitcoin treasury strategies. Although Strategy (MSTR) pioneered the trend back in 2020, the follow-on adoption by others was slow. However, after yet another cycle of bear market and bull market activity, as well as a major 2023 FASB update for how bitcoin is accounted for on balance sheets, the years 2024 and 2025 have ushered in a new wave of companies adopting bitcoin as a treasury asset. This article explores that trend, and examines whether it’s good or bad for the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole. It also touches on the topic of bitcoin as a medium of exchange vs a store of value, which in my view is commonly misunderstood from an economic perspective. Why Bitcoin Stocks and Bonds? Back in August 2024 when this trend was pretty nescient, I wrote an article called “A New Look at Corporate Treasury Strategy” that explained the usefulness of bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset. Back then, only a handful of companies were making use of it at scale, and since then there’s been a wave of new and existing companies adopting the strategy — bitcoin stocks everywhere. And the bitcoin stocks that were doing it at scale back then, such as Strategy and Metaplanet, are up huge in terms of price and market capitalization. That article explained why corporations should consider implementing the strategy. But what about investors? Why has this become so popular with them? From an investor perspective, why buy bitcoin stocks and not just buy bitcoin? There are a couple of primary reasons. Bitcoin Stocks, Reason #1: Capital with a Mandate There are trillions of dollars of managed capital, and some of that has strict mandates associated with it. For example, there are stock funds where the portfolio manager can only buy stocks. He or she cannot buy bonds, ETFs, commodities or other things. Just stocks. Similarly, there are bond funds where the portfolio manager can only buy bonds. And, of course, there are more specific mandates, like managers that can only buy healthcare stocks or non-investment-grade bonds, for example. Some of those managers are bullish on bitcoin. In many cases they own some themselves. But they can’t express that view by sticking bitcoin in a stock fund or a bond fund, since it goes against their mandate. However, if someone creates a stock that has bitcoin on the balance sheet (bitcoin stocks), or a convertible bond for a stock with bitcoin on the balance sheet, that they can buy. The portfolio manager can now express their bullish bitcoin view within their fund for themselves and their investors. That’s a previously untapped market that is increasingly being tapped in the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, South Korea and elsewhere. I’ll use myself as a tangible micro-example of how a bitcoin treasury company was useful for this purpose. I’ve been running a real-money model portfolio for my free public newsletter since 2018. It lets readers keep track of my positions transparently. In early 2020 I strongly recommended bitcoin as an investment in my research service, and bought some myself. By extension, I wanted to add some bitcoin exposure to my newsletter portfolio, but the brokerage I use for the portfolio offered no access to bitcoin stocks or bitcoin-related securities at the time. I couldn’t even buy the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) for the model portfolio back then because it traded over the counter rather than on a major exchange. Fortunately, Strategy (known as MicroStrategy at the time) added bitcoin to its balance sheet in August 2020. That stock traded on the Nasdaq, and my model portfolio brokerage could buy it. So, with my various constraints for that particular portfolio, I was happy to buy MSTR for the growth stocks section to express my bullish view on bitcoin. The portfolio has been long MSTR ever since, and it’s been a great decision for nearly five years now: The brokerage eventually added GBTC as a buyable security, and of course eventually added the major spot bitcoin ETFs when they became available, and yet I’ve continued to hold onto MSTR in that portfolio as well (for the upcoming second reason described below). In short, there are many funds, due to mandates, that can only own stocks or bonds with bitcoin exposure; not ETFs or similar securities. Bitcoin treasury corporations (“Bitcoin stocks”) give them access. This is in addition to, rather than mainly competing with, bitcoin as a bearer asset that individuals can custody themselves. Bitcoin Stocks, Reason #2: Corporations Have Ideal Leverage The basic strategy for a corporation to adopt bitcoin as a treasury asset is to just hold some bitcoin instead of cash equivalents. However, the first bitcoin stocks, unlocking this concept, tended to have very high conviction about the idea. As a result, the trend has been not just to buy bitcoin, but to buy bitcoin with leverage. And it happens to be the case that publicly traded operating corporations have access to better types of leverage than hedge funds and most other types of capital. Specifically, they have the ability to issue corporate bonds. Hedge funds and certain other pools of capital typically use margin loans. They borrow money and use it to buy more assets, but they risk having a margin call if the value of the assets drops too low relative to the amount of money borrowed. A margin call can force the hedge fund to sell assets if they dip too much in price, even when they have a strong conviction that those assets will recover to new highs. Having to liquidate a good asset at its lows is a catastrophe. In contrast, corporations can issue bonds, often with multiyear durations. If they hold bitcoin and the price dips, they don’t have to sell prematurely. This gives them a better ability to weather periods of volatility than entities that rely on margin loans. There are still bearish scenarios that could force corporations to liquidate, but those scenarios would involve a much longer bear market occurring, thus making them less likely. This type of longer-duration corporate leverage is also usually better in the long run than leveraged ETFs. Since leveraged ETFs don’t use long-term debt, their leverage resets daily, and so volatility is often quite bad for them. (Fidelity has a good article that breaks down the numbers with examples.) From that article, a useful chart shows what happens to a 2x leveraged ETF if the underlying asset alternates between +10% and -10% days. Over time, the leveraged product deteriorates relative to the index that it’s leveraged to: In practice, the 2x leveraged bitcoin ETF BITU hasn’t really outperformed bitcoin since its inception, despite bitcoin having increased in price during that period. You’d expect the 2x leveraged version to greatly outperform, but instead it mainly just added volatility without superior returns. This chart goes back as far as BITU’s inception: The same is true when you look at the long-term histories of volatile equity sectors, like the 2x leveraged versions of the financial sector or the energy sector. Over a choppy period, they’ve greatly underperformed: So, daily leverage is pretty bad unless you’re a short-term trader. Volatility hurts that type of leverage. However, having longer-duration debt attached to an asset doesn’t generally lead to the same problem. An appreciating asset with multi-year duration debt attached to it is a powerful combination. Therefore, bitcoin treasury companies are useful securities for high-conviction bitcoin bulls that want some reasonably safe leverage to juice the returns. Not everyone should take on leverage, but those who do will naturally want to do it in the most optimal way. There are now all sorts of different bitcoin treasury companies in terms of their risk profile, size, sector, jurisdiction, and so forth. It’s a genuine market demand that is now being met over time. Similarly, some of the securities offered by these corporations, such as the convertible debt or the preferred, can offer bitcoin price exposure with less volatility. While some investors may want that extra volatility, others may want less, and the range of available securities provide investors with the specific type of exposure they want. Do Corporations Help or Hurt Bitcoin’s Mission? Now that we know why they exist and the niche they fill for investors, the next question to ask is: Are corporations good for the Bitcoin network as a whole? Does their mere existence damage the value of bitcoin as freedom money? To have a view on whether corporations are good or bad for bitcoin, one must have some sort of pathway in mind for how a decentralized money would theoretically catch on, if it were to do so. What steps would have to happen, and in roughly what order? So, this section will consist of two steps. The first will be an economic analysis of what it takes for a new form of money to catch on, i.e., an analysis of what a path toward success would even look like. The second will be an analysis of whether corporations add or detract from that path. Step 1: What Would Success Look Like? “What would it seem like if it did seem like a global, digital, sound, open source, programmable money was monetizing from absolute zero? Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, ‘tell me, why do people say it is more natural to think that the sun rotates around the earth than that the earth is rotating?”’The friend said, ‘well, obviously, because it just seems like the sun is going around the earth.‘ Wittgenstein replied, ‘well, what would it seem like if it did seem like the earth were rotating?‘”Wittgenstein’s Money, Allen Farrington, 2020 Bitcoin was launched in early 2009. Throughout 2009 and 2010, some enthusiasts mined it, collected it, tested it, speculated with it, or examined if they could contribute to it or improve it in some way. They liked the idea of it. In 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto himself described on the Bitcoin Talk forum how the network might initially bootstrap some tiny initial value: As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold but with the following properties:– boring grey in colour– not a good conductor of electricity– not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either– not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose and one special, magical property:– can be transported over a communications channel If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it. After some initial success, the challenge for bitcoin from there was that the network spawned a million competitors. Countless altcoins arose with similar capabilities, mainly that you could buy it, transfer it, and the recipient could sell it. And stablecoins, introduced in 2014, let you do that with dollar-collateralized tokens rather than free-floating units, which helped strip out the volatility. In fact, the rise of competitors was the biggest reason why I didn’t buy bitcoin at that time in the early 2010s. It wasn’t that I was against the concept (quite the contrary), but I viewed the industry as 1) filled with speculative froth and 2) able to be copied into oblivion. In other words, there might be a finite supply of bitcoin, but the idea is infinite. But then in the later 2010s I noticed something: Bitcoin’s network effect was succeeding as portable capital. It was breaking through that ceiling. Much like a communication protocol (whether a spoken language, a written script, or a digital standard), money as a concept greatly benefits from network effects. The more people that use it, the better it is for others to use as well, which is self-reinforcing. And that’s where wanting to hold it really matters. That’s where the network effect has to grow to reach past this niche and crowded stage. We can categorize two types of money for this context: The first type of money is “situational money,” which refers to money that can solve a specific problem but that otherwise isn’t of wide interest. An asset that you can buy with your local money, transfer across points of high friction (capital controls, payment deplatforming, etc.), and have the recipient sell/exchange it for their local money, is a situational money. It has value, but being successful on that front does not necessarily lead to wider success. The second type of money is “ubiquitous money,” which refers to money that, within a given region or industry, is widely accepted as a matter of course. And importantly, the recipient doesn’t sell/exchange it as soon as they get it; they hold it as a cash balance and then potentially re-spend it elsewhere. In order for something to be used as ubiquitous money, the spender has to already have it, and the recipient has to want to hold it. Notably, people usually want to receive more of what they already have. After all, if a potential recipient wanted to hold it, they likely would have already bought some. So, if a new type of ubiquitous money were to arise, the majority of people would likely first encounter it as an investment, acquire some because they view it as likely to appreciate in purchasing power, and then be willing to receive more of it as payment as well. At that point, they don’t need to be convinced to accept it as payment; they already like the asset, so whether they are buying more of it or people are directly giving it to them as a means of payment, are nearly the same thing. Bitcoin’s simple and secure design (proof-of-work, fixed supply, limited script complexity, modest node requirements, and a founder that disappeared leaving decentralization in his wake) and early mover advantage (bootstrapping a network effect) gave it the best liquidity and perception of soundness, and thus many people began wanting to buy it and hold it. And so far, that’s where bitcoin has had a ton of success: as a sound and portable store of value that gives the user the option to spend it or exchange it. A sound, liquid, fungible, portable store of value sits in the intermediate zone between situational money and ubiquitous money. Unlike situational money, it’s increasingly perceived by people as a good thing to hold for the longer run rather than just sell/exchange immediately if you receive some. But unlike ubiquitous money, in most areas it is not yet widely accepted, because the number of people who have taken time to analyze it are still a small minority. It’s a necessary step to bridge between those two types, and I would argue it’s a very long process to go through. The reason it takes a long time to go through that stage is due to volatility, and due to the sheer size of the existing network effect it is up against that people have their expenses and liabilities denominated in. If a new monetary network with its own unit (i.e., not pegged to an existing currency as a credit rail on top of it, but rather a fully parallel system to central banks) is going to bootstrap from zero to massive, it requires upward volatility. And any appreciating asset with upward volatility will attract speculators and leverage, which inevitably leads to periods of downward volatility. In other words, it’ll look like this: During its adoption phase — where it’s going from worth nothing to worth the equivalent of trillions of dollars — it makes a rather flawed form of near-term money. If you receive some bitcoin and want to use it to pay your rent at the end of the month (and are on a pretty tight budget, i.e., not swimming in excess cash), neither you nor your landlord can deal with it potentially going down by 20% within the span of a month. The landlord has expenses in the existing network effect of fiat currency; she needs to reliably know what her value in rent from the tenant will be. And you, as a renter, need to make sure you can pay your rent at the end of the month with money that won’t surprise you with a rapid loss in value. The same is true for other costs of living in general. And so, bitcoin is treated mainly as an investment during this era. Hardcore enthusiasts will be more likely to want to spend it. People with specific payment problems (capital controls, payment deplatforming, and so forth) are more likely to want to spend it as well, although they increasingly have similarly liquid options like stablecoins for that purpose. The fact that stablecoins are centralized doesn’t matter much if you’re primarily using them for a few days, weeks, or months like a checking account. There are some very well-meaning Bitcoin proponents trying to convince bitcoin holders to spend it more. I don’t particularly view that as a sustainable practice. Bitcoin is not going to catch on as a charity. In order for spending it to catch on persistently at scale (i.e., not just billions of dollar-equivalents in annual global medium-of-exchange volume, but trillions), it has to solve problems for spenders and/or recipients that other solutions are not doing. And at this stage of adoption, that’s not necessarily the case, especially with capital gains taxes applicable to every single transaction and with options like stablecoins for near-term spending needs where volatility needs to be low. The best advice I can give to these proponents is that while educating people is good (keep it up!), it is important to manage expectations along the way and understand the economic path dependencies at play. This is where the topic of optionality is important, and it’s a topic I observe to be widely misunderstood or underappreciated. Owning a sound, liquid, fungible, portable store of value that is going through its adoption phase gives the owner some perks, or options, that other assets do not. Mainly, they can bring their store of value wherever they want in the world without relying on central counterparties and credit. It also allows them to make cross-border payments, including to deplatformed recipients, through substantial friction even if they are staying put where they are. They might not be able to ubiquitously pay with it, but if need be they can find ways to convert it to local currency in most environments that they find themselves in, and in some cases can indeed pay with it directly. When analyzed through this lens, bitcoin is incredibly successful. To see why, first we have to understand how shockingly unsalable most monies are. Imagine you are going to go to a random country. What money or other portable, liquid, fungible bearer asset can you bring with you to ensure that you have plenty of buying power without relying on a global chain of credit? In other words, even if all your credit cards shut off, how can you ensure that you could, with some annoyance and friction, still be able to transact? The best answer currently is generally physical U.S dollars. If you bring U.S dollars with you, then although you may have trouble directly spending them with many types of merchants, it’s pretty easy to find someone willing to convert dollars to local currency at a reasonable rate and with sufficient liquidity. The second, third, and fourth best answers are probably gold and silver coins, and euros. Once again, it’s really not that hard to find brokers in most countries willing to take gold and silver, or euros, and give you fair local value in return. After that, it starts to fall off pretty rapidly: Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, British pounds and some others are in the top ten. This is where there tends to be more frictions for conversion. I would put bitcoin in the top ten at this point, somewhere in the #5-10 range, particularly if the place you’re going to is any sort of urban center. Most cities will have plenty of conversion options that you can seek out if need be. That’s remarkable considering that it’s only 16 years old. Below that, is the long tail of 160+ other fiat currencies. I often use the examples of Egyptian pounds and Norwegian kroner, since I go to Egypt every year and Norway every couple of years and tend to have a bit of their paper money around. They’re terrible money outside of their own countries, as are the vast majority of currencies. It's harder for me to spend Egyptian pounds in New Jersey than it is to spend bitcoin. Same for the currencies of 100+ other countries.It's arguably already one of the world's top ten monies in terms of international salability. Somewhere in the 5-10 range most likely. — Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) July 1, 2025 Dollars are the most liquid money in the world today. Smaller and less liquid assets are almost always priced in larger and more liquid assets, rather than the other way around. The larger and more liquid monetary network is what people use as their unit of account and have most of their liabilities denominated in, so that is their reference point. A long time ago, dollars were defined by a certain amount of gold. Eventually the dollar network became larger and more ubiquitous than gold, and the situation flipped: now gold is primarily priced in dollars. In the long arc of time, bitcoin could flip the dollar in this way, but it’s not anywhere near that level yet. It doesn’t matter what bitcoin is priced in along the way; it’s a bearer asset that can be priced in whatever the largest and most liquid money is, and if it one day becomes the largest and most liquid money, then other things would routinely be priced in it as a matter of course. While people are free to mentally price things in whatever they want, it’s unreasonable to expect most people to price things in bitcoin any time soon. And it doesn’t make sense for critics to describe this as a flaw of bitcoin; there’s no other path that a new decentralized monetary asset can bootstrap through than to be routinely priced in the existing currencies while it is small and growing. Step 2: How Corporations and Bitcoin Stocks Fit In Back in 2014, Pierre Rochard wrote a prescient article called “Speculative Attack.” A speculative attack in FX markets refers to borrowing a weak currency to buy more of a strong currency or other superior assets. It’s one of the reasons why central banks raise rates to strengthen their currencies; it helps disincentivize them from being borrowed too rapidly relative to other currencies. If that proves insufficient, some countries will turn to outright capital controls to prevent entities from arbitraging their mismanaged currency (and those capital controls themselves come at economic costs, as who wants to do business in a country with tightening capital controls if there are better options elsewhere?). Wikipedia provides a useful definition: In economics, a speculative attack is a precipitous selling of untrustworthy assets by previously inactive speculators and the corresponding acquisition of some valuable assets (currencies, gold). Well, in Rochard’s article, he described that eventually, due to bitcoin’s appreciating nature, various entities will end up borrowing currencies to buy more bitcoin. Bitcoin was a bit over $600 at the time, with a market capitalization of a bit over $8 billion. At first, borrowing to buy bitcoin was just around the margins. But now that the Bitcoin network is highly liquid and has a $2+ trillion market capitalization, it has entered mainstream capital markets at scale with billions of dollars of corporate bonds outstanding for the specific purpose of buying more bitcoin. Here in the present, 11 years later where it’s routinely happening, is this good or bad for Bitcoin as a network? From what I have seen, there are two main types of critics that would say it is not good for the Bitcoin network. The first type of critic is themselves a subset of bitcoin users. Many of them are in the cypherpunk camp, or the self-sovereignty camp. To hand over bitcoin to custodians seems dangerous, or at least against the ethos of the network, from many of their perspectives. A term I’ve seen used by some of them to refer to corporate bitcoin treasury proponents is “suitcoiners” which I think is a great term. This bitcoin camp as a whole would much rather people hold their own private keys. Some of them go further and say that rehypothecation of major custodians could suppress the price or otherwise impair bitcoin’s ability to succeed as freedom money. While I like the values of this camp (and am basically in it myself), some of them seem to hold utopian dreams where everyone becomes as interested in fully controlling their own money as they are. The second type of critic are generally people who have stated a negative view of bitcoin in the past. They have questioned bitcoin’s ability to succeed over many years. As it keeps rising to new heights as the best-performing asset around, many years and multiple cycles later, some of them have instead changed their view to something like, “bitcoin may be going up in price, but it has been captured.” I take this camp less seriously than the first camp, and view it mostly as cope. It’s similar to permabears in equity markets that, when their bearish thesis hasn’t played out after a decade, shift to saying something like, “the market is only up because the Fed printed so much money.” My response to that would be, “well, yeah, that’s why you shouldn’t have been bearish.” What I would say to both of those camps is to point out that just because some large pools of capital choose to hold bitcoin, it does not mean that “free range” bitcoin is in any way impaired. It can be self-custodied and sent peer-to-peer just like it always has been. And if anything, as many other types of entities hold it, it makes the network larger and less volatile, which improves its usefulness as peer-to-peer money as well. It also potentially provides political cover to help normalize the asset relative to policymakers that want to cause it harm. Bitcoin stocks and large pools of capital buying bitcoin were always going to happen if it reached this scale. One of the skills that permabears have (regardless of the asset in question) is to pivot the narrative whenever needed so that regardless of what’s happening, they’re right and the asset is unsuccessful. For bitcoin, it means creating a narrative such that there is no conceivable path to success or any reasonable definition of what success looks like. If it’s stuck at the niche retail level? Then its price appreciation and ability to positively impact the world is impaired- see it is failing! If it’s adopted by large entities and governments and continues to grow massively? Then it’s captured and lost its way! But if it’s going to become large, widely accepted, and change the world in some way, how does that path not go through corporations and governments at some point? Bitcoin has gone through a few major eras in terms of who is moving the price and accumulating most rapidly. In era one, people mined it on their computers, or they sent money to a trading card exchange in Japan (Mt Gox) to buy some, and other friction-filled early-adopter types of things. This was the super-early user era. In era two, particularly after Mt Gox blew up, it became easier to buy and use. On-shore exchanges let people in many countries buy bitcoin much more easily than before. The first hardware wallets came out in 2014, which made it safer to self-custody bitcoin. This was the retail buyer era, where frictions were still present but were diminishing. In era three, it became large and liquid enough, and with a sufficiently long track record, to attract more institutions. Entities built institutional-grade custodians for it. Publicly-traded corporations started buying some, and various ETFs and other financial products came out to allow various funds and managed pools of capital to get exposure. Some nation states like the Kingdom of Bhutan, El Salvador, and the UAE mined it or bought it and hold it at the sovereign level. Others like the U.S. have chosen to hold their confiscated coins rather than keep selling them back to the market. Fortunately — and this is important — each era still includes the prior ones. Even though corporations are doing most of the net buying currently, retail investors can still buy as much as they want as well. It has never been easier to buy bitcoin and take safe self custody of it. There are plenty of resources explaining how to do it, multiple inexpensive and robust wallet solutions, and on-chain transaction fees are currently low. I see people say things like, “I thought bitcoin was supposed to be for the people. For peer-to-peer cash. Now it’s all big corporations.” And it is for the people- anyone with an internet access can buy it, hold it, or send it. None of that is negated by large entities (which are also run by people) buying it as well. That is why I’m in agreement with both the cypherpunks and the suitcoiners. I want bitcoin to be useful as freedom money, and that’s in large part why I’m a general partner at Ego Death Capital, where we provide capital to startup companies that build solutions for the Bitcoin network and its users. That’s also why I support the Human Rights Foundation and other nonprofits as they fund developers and education providers that focus on providing financial tools to people in authoritarian or inflationary environments. And yet, it’s also rational that large pools of capital, whether it be corporations, investment funds, or even sovereign entities, are going to buy bitcoin once they figure it out. It’s large and liquid enough to be on their radar now. It’s important to remember that the majority of people are not active investors. They don’t buy individual stocks, and they don’t deeply analyze the difference between bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If they do speculate on something as a trader, they’re likely to buy in at the top and get shaken out at the bottom. Investments are often assigned to them in passive ways rather than chosen by them for themselves. In older days, it was typically a pension. Today it’s often automatic 401(k) employer matching with a mix of index funds, or a financial advisor picking investments for them. In my view, it’s unreasonable to expect billions of people to flock to bitcoin as an active decision. It is, however, reasonable to work hard to make it so that anyone can access bitcoin if they choose to by making the barriers to entry as low and frictionless as possible via technological solutions and educational resources. Thanks to the hard work of many, frictions have never been lower than they are right now. The best phrasing I’ve seen for this is: “Bitcoin is for anyone, not everyone.” What this means in practice is that everyone should be led to water on the topic, but only a subset will choose to drink. Summary Points To summarize this longform article, the way Bitcoin’s monetization has unfolded so far is roughly like this, and none of it should be surprising: Bitcoin started out as a collectible for enthusiasts and/or people with big dreams for change. A neat new technological possibility to play with that might one day be worth something or provide some value to people, with varying levels of conviction. Bitcoin started to become useful for situational medium-of-exchange purposes, even by pragmatists who were otherwise not focusing on it. Need to send money to a country with capital controls? Bitcoin could succeed where other payment rails failed. Need to receive payments or donations despite being deplatformed from the major online payment portals, like Wikileaks? Bitcoin could be a great workaround. This established some degree of novel utility. Various frictions like high volatility, countless competitors, and capital gains taxes acted as headwinds against bitcoin’s continued growth as a common medium of exchange. It still is growing for that use, but remains relatively small in that sense relative to what some people thought it might be like after 16 years. If you spend bitcoin with a merchant that does not hold bitcoin, and they auto-convert it to fiat currency, then the benefits of bitcoin are not being fully realized, and there’s a ceiling on how useful it will be for that purpose. Every point of currency exchange is a friction, and the network effects are weak for a “receive and immediately sell” situational type of asset/network, which results in a crowded field of competition at this stage. Bitcoin became recognized more broadly as the ideal form of portable appreciating capital. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, it reached a level of decentralization, security, simplicity, scarcity, and scale that made it attractive to hold for years with confidence. This is where network effects are more powerful. While it’s not always easy to buy coffee with it, it has started to reach into the top ten bearer assets that you could bring with you internationally and exchange for local value, surpassing the vast majority of the 160+ fiat currencies in that regard. The Bitcoin network reached sufficient liquidity, scale, and longevity to attract the positive interest of corporations and governments. There are huge pools of managed capital that are interested in the asset, and corporations and funds give them indirect access to it. Meanwhile, bitcoin continues to exist as an open and permissionless network, which means individuals continue to use it and build upon it as well.We can then look at two more levels, which are potentially ahead if the network keeps expanding: As the Bitcoin network becomes larger, more liquid, and less volatile, the more interesting it can become for large sovereign entities. What starts out as a small sovereign fund investment can eventually find its way into currency reserves or as a method of international settlement at scale. Countries keep trying to build closed source alternative payment methods with little adoption or agreement for them, while this open source settlement network with a finite supply of its own independent units is gradually bootstrapping itself across the world. The larger, more liquid, and less volatile it becomes, the more attractive it can become for shorter-term holding periods as well, and thus can potentially assert itself as a more ubiquitous medium of exchange. This should only be expected when tons of people already hold it and are already comfortable with it, and when its purchasing power can be relied upon in the short term in addition to the long term. Overall, I continue to view Bitcoin as being in a good place technically and economically, and its path of adoption is expanding as expected. Best regards, This post The Rise of Bitcoin Stocks and Bonds first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Lyn Alden.