Bitcoin at $65 000: stalled, or simply early?

I already felt late back in 2017, when I Fomo’d into bitcoin early in the November bull run. But I dove deep into the rabbit hole and – like many others – came out the other side convinced that bitcoin is the hardest money humans have ever invented. The technology has been proven many times over. And yet, almost a decade later, mainstream adoption still feels painfully slow. Why aren’t people getting it?

Humanity has used seashells, salt, cattle and glass beads as money. Each was eventually abandoned for the same reason: someone found a way to produce more of it cheaply, and holders of the old money were quietly robbed of their savings. As the writer Robert Breedlove has argued, good money must be divisible, durable, portable, recognisable and – above all – scarce. Gold won out over every rival for millennia because it scored best on that last property: nobody could simply make (or print) more of it.

Bitcoin takes each of those properties further. It is divisible to a hundred-millionth of a coin, weightless, transferable across the planet in minutes, and – crucially – capped at 21 million units by code that has run for 17 years. The network has operated with more than 99.98% uptime (apart from the Value Overflow Incident in the very early days and a six-hour chain fork in 2013) and its core consensus rules have proven resilient against attacks for over 15 years. Gold’s supply still grows about 1-2% a year as miners dig more out of the ground; bitcoin’s issuance schedule is fixed until the last coin is mined around 2140. It is, in short, the first money in history with perfect scarcity.

And no, a company cannot simply launch a “better bitcoin”: money is a winner-take-most network effect, and bitcoin’s credibility rests on a fair, founderless launch that cannot be repeated – any coin with an issuer is just another party you have to trust.

The fiat experiment

Compare that perfect scarcity to the money in your bank account. In August 1971, then-US President Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s last link to gold, and the entire world has been running on unbacked government money ever since – a 55-year experiment, historically speaking still a young one.

The results are visible in every grocery till: the dollar has lost roughly 86% of its purchasing power since 1971, while the US M2 money supply has ballooned from about US$630-billion to over $22-trillion. The rand has fared far worse. And the pandemic showed what happens when the printer really gets going: to keep everything afloat, US money supply grew 19% in 2020 and another 16% in 2021 – against a 6% annual average over the preceding two decades – as roughly $6.4-trillion in new money entered the economy – effectively out of thin air.

The inflation surge that followed was no coincidence. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is the design. Central bankers will tell you mild inflation is a feature; it encourages spending and gives policymakers room to fight recessions. Perhaps. But the cost of that flexibility is carried by anyone who saves in that money – which is to say, most of the world’s population. Everyone’s money is getting diluted more and more, with every passing second.

Adoption is happening. The US established a strategic bitcoin reserve in 2025 holding some 200 000 seized coins. Bhutan has mined its way to a treasury at times worth more than a billion dollars, El Salvador retains its holdings, and Brazil and Kazakhstan are debating reserves of their own. Wall Street arrived via the spot ETFs – the most successful ETF launch in history, pulling in $107-billion in their first year. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust became the fastest ETF ever to reach $80-billion in assets, getting there in 374 days; the previous record holder, the SPDR gold ETF, took 1 691 days. The funds collectively hold more than 1.2 million bitcoins – nearly 6% of the entire supply – and custody giants like BNY Mellon and State Street have built digital asset platforms.

And yet the people are still largely absent. Estimates of bitcoin ownership vary wildly by methodology: on-chain analysis suggests roughly 106 million holders, while survey-based research counted about 365 million in 2025, including indirect exposure through ETFs and fintech apps. Against a world population of 8.2 billion, that is somewhere between 1.3% and 4.5% of humanity. Most governments hold none at all. For bitcoiners, it feels painfully slow.

Is it slow, though?

I put the question to Farzam Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange VALR, a man who once led blockchain initiatives inside Rand Merchant Bank and has seen this from both sides of the fence.

“Behavioural and societal change seems slow while it is happening, but in retrospect it becomes clear how quickly things changed,” he told me. “It’s important to remember that bitcoin is only 17 years old – in human terms not even an adult – and yet bitcoin has gone from an unknown term and technology to an asset class in the trillions of dollars with the largest asset managers, institutions, and even central banks holding it on their balance sheets.”

He has a point on that last claim: this year the Czech National Bank bought bitcoin for a $1-million test portfolio, the first time bitcoin has appeared on the balance sheet of a central bank in the EU.

Prices, he acknowledged, have come down about 50% from their highs – bitcoin trades around $65 000 at the time of writing, down from an all-time high of about $126 000 in October 2025 – “but the characteristics of bitcoin that make it so attractive – digitally scarce, decentralised, censorship-resistant and native to the internet – have persisted and strengthened”.

“Financial history has shown time and again that money changes its form and nature and civilisation evolves. We’re currently in one of those evolutionary periods, transitioning from money that belongs to people of a particular nation to money that belongs to the people of the world,” Ehsani said.

“One must remember that the young crypto aficionados of today are the future board members of large institutions. As leaders of institutions change, so do the sentiments, perspectives and priorities of those institutions.”

The remaining barriers

The obstacles remain real. The incumbent system is not neutral: the dollar standard confers enormous privilege on the US, and entire industries – banking, payments, government borrowing – are built on the ability to expand credit at will. Nobody dismantles their own privilege voluntarily. Regulators move slowly, institutional custody and accounting rules took years to untangle, and volatility still frightens treasurers. The energy consumed by bitcoin mining remains a genuine point of contention, too – a debate that deserves its own column.

And then there is the newest spectre: quantum computing. Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Gidney showed last year that breaking modern encryption could require 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated, and a follow-up paper in March, co-authored with Stanford’s Dan Boneh, estimated that the elliptic curve cryptography protecting bitcoin signatures could fall to a machine of fewer than 500 000 physical qubits. No such machine exists – today’s largest processors are in the low thousands of qubits – but Google has set itself a post-quantum migration target of 2029. The timelines are shortening.

Bitcoin’s developers are not sitting idle though, far from it. In February, a proposal known as BIP-360 was merged into bitcoin’s official proposal repository, specifying a quantum-resistant address type, while a companion proposal from security veteran Jameson Lopp maps out a full phased migration away from vulnerable addresses. Neither has been activated on the network yet – that requires community consensus and a soft fork.

The race is for that consensus and implementation to arrive before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer does – and there are trillions of dollars of incentive to make sure it does. It’s worth noting the same quantum threat hangs over the traditional financial system, which will have to make the same migration with far more legacy baggage.

Patience, then

So maybe Ehsani is right. Maybe adoption is fast, measured against the centuries it took gold to become money, and bitcoiners simply need more patience. But when I see what currency debasement does to the livelihoods of ordinary people who can buy less and less with their earnings each year, patience wears thin.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Africa, where on-chain crypto volumes surged 52% to over $205-billion in the year to June 2025, driven in large part by Nigerians seeking refuge from a devaluing naira. Venezuela makes the same point at the extreme: with the bolívar collapsing and inflation near 270%, nearly 40% of peer-to-peer transactions there now run in crypto. Most of it is dollar stablecoins rather than bitcoin for now, probably because it feels more familiar – but that is the same lesson at work: when money breaks, people flee to the “hardest” money they can reach. Ordinary people are not waiting for permission; they are already (albeit gradually) opting out.

Read: Eskom developing bitcoin mining plan but needs Nersa’s nod

Do your own research, as the saying goes. I have yet to meet anyone who did a genuinely deep dive on bitcoin and came out unconvinced (apart from Nassim Taleb, whose core objection applies with equal force to the fiat money in your wallet). The economist Saifedean Ammous built an entire book, The Bitcoin Standard, on the lesson that when monetary networks collide, the harder money wins. Seventeen years in, that lesson is holding.

• Dr Fanie van Rooyen is deputy editor at TechCentral. He has been a bitcoin HODLer since 2017
• Subscribe to TechCentral’s daily newsletter
• Get breaking news alerts on WhatsApp