Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin pioneer and programmer, made a bold prediction in 2009: if Bitcoin becomes the world's dominant payment system, each coin could be worth $10 million.
Finney's prediction resurfaced after 16 years thanks to Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, who shared a snippet of Finney's discussion on the BitcoinTalk forum.
In the discussion, which took place on Jan. 10, 2009, a day after Satoshi Nakamoto released version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software, seven days after Bitcoin's genesis block was mined by its pseudonymous creator and a few days after Finney himself received the first Bitcoin transaction, the computer scientist laid out his reasoning for the $10 million price target.
Finney's logic was based on the assumption that if Bitcoin becomes the world's dominant payment system, its value should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world.
"As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world," Finney wrote.
"Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million."
Finney's prediction has been a subject of fascination within the Bitcoin community, especially considering that when he made the prediction, Bitcoin was still valued at $0.
At the current price of $93,726, Bitcoin is still far from reaching Finney's $10 million target, but his prediction continues to inspire long-term faith in the cryptocurrency among its proponents.
