The Bank That Called Bitcoin a Pet Rock Just Priced It In

From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1617

The Numbers

Price has stayed pinned near $81K while JPMorgan's report moved the longer term conversation instead.

The News

JPMorgan added Bitcoin to its 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions for the first time this week, and the base case lands at a 10% annualized return for bitcoin over the next 10 years. The bear case is worse than most expected and the bull case is weaker than any Bitcoiner wants, but the bank also set a bear case of -9.7% and a bull case of 17%.

Even with those modest numbers, Bitcoin still comes out on top. JPMorgan's 10% compound annual return over 10-15 years is the highest of any asset class in the report, above private equity, U.S. REITs, large-cap equities, and gold. It just still isn't in the actual portfolio. The bank's own release draws the line that a return range isn't an allocation.

The hosts ran JPMorgan's numbers through Bitcoin's current price live on air. Bear case math landed at roughly $211,000 in 10 years, bull case at roughly $391,000. For comparison, Saylor's own 30% compound rate gets to $1.1 million and Strive's Matt Cole's 40% rate gets to $2.3 million over the same decade.

As one host put it on air, the suits are shilling Bitcoin now.

Julian, who runs the Swiss self-custodial exchange Relai, called this Bitcoin's version of an IPO moment. The earliest buyers who made a fortune are taking profit, and the money that missed the early run is the one buying now.

He pointed to the big original wallets that have been selling this year, with the other side of those trades landing at BlackRock, Strategy, and the rest of the Bitcoin treasury companies. Same pattern as an early tech investor cashing out once the company goes public, just with Bitcoin instead of stock.

Relai's own exchange data backs the turn. User activity bottomed in April, nearly retested that low in July, and has climbed every month since August. His read: not a full bull market yet, but winter is over, with the next leg likely six to nine months out.

The next decade of adoption has new names attached to it: Larry Fink, Michael Saylor, and the Trump family.

The Culture

Guest coinjoin Chris argued the real brake on Bitcoin adoption the last few years wasn't the market, it was Bitcoiners turning on each other. Purity spirals kept raising the bar until everyone eventually failed some test and got pushed out of the tribe.

He thinks the recent BIP-110 fork fight marked the end of that era, clearing room for actual engineering. His current focus is BIP 448 covenants, which would let a wallet cap how much Bitcoin can leave per day or restrict withdrawals to pre-approved addresses, giving self-custody a way to undo a hack instead of just losing the funds for good.

He also waved off quantum computing as a near-term threat, arguing a classical break in Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography is far more likely than a working quantum computer, and that Bitcoin's developers already have upgrade paths ready if that changes.

His closing message to the camera: be excellent to each other.