Here is a scary read for today.
You might think or reject the idea that Bitcoin is revolutionary.
It is, actually. But not in the way you think.
Every monetary technology in human history, from gold coins to paper bonds to Bitcoin, has followed a remarkably similar adoption playbook. Six stages. Same challenges. Same pattern.
Don’t want to speculate but here’s what everyone overlooks: we’re watching Bitcoin speed-run a process that took gold 2,700 years and the dollar 200 years.
That’s not just interesting.
That’s predictive.
The Pattern Nobody Talks About
I spent last week diving into monetary history after watching Johnny Harris’s “Gold Explained, Finally” video. Not because I’m a history nerd (okay, maybe a little), but because I wanted to answer a simple question: Are we actually watching something new, or are we watching history rhyme at hyperspeed?
Turns out, it’s the latter.
Gold didn’t just “become money.” It went through distinct, identifiable stages. So did sovereign bonds. So did the dollar. And Bitcoin is currently somewhere in the middle of that same journey, moving faster than anything before it.
The stages aren’t random. They’re physics.
Network effects, trust accumulation, infrastructure buildout, financialization, institutional adoption, and finally, regulatory settlement. Every single monetary technology hits these milestones in the same order.
What changes is the speed and the constraints.
Gold was constrained by physics. You can’t email gold bars.
Bonds and the dollar were constrained by state power and legal systems.
Bitcoin is constrained by code, throughput, and the fact that it has no army backing it.
But the arc? Identical.
The Six Stages of Monetary Adoption
Here’s the framework that applies to every monetary technology:
Stage 1: Spark
A new monetary technology appears. Early adopters experiment. Narrative dominates utility. Most people think it’s either useless or a scam.
Stage 2: Hoarding & Price Discovery
Early users accumulate as a store of value. Volatility is extreme because the market is thin. Prices swing wildly based on marginal buyers and sellers.
Stage 3: Rails & Gateways
Infrastructure arrives. For gold, that meant mints and assays. For bonds, clearinghouses and banks. For Bitcoin, wallets and exchanges. Usability improves. Network effects compound.
Stage 4: Financialization
Leverage appears. Derivatives. Collateral use. Market-making deepens liquidity. The asset starts mattering for credit creation, not just value storage.
Stage 5: Reserve & Standardization
Large institutions hold it in size. Some countries or systems index to it or settle trade with it. Legal and accounting norms harden. It becomes infrastructure.
Stage 6: Stress Test & Settlement with the State
Crises test the system. Rules are rewritten or standardized. The technology either becomes core plumbing, or it gets constrained to a niche.
Every monetary technology goes through this sequence.
Gold. Bonds. The dollar. Bitcoin.
Same stages. Different speeds.
Gold’s 2,700-Year Journey
Gold coins first appeared around 600 BC in ancient Lydia.
For centuries, gold was just an ornament and a means of hoarding. Stages 1 and 2 lasted forever because the technology to standardize it didn’t exist yet.
Then came mints. Stage 3 hit when city-states and empires started minting standardized coins with official marks and assays. Suddenly, you could verify weight and purity without testing every single time. Transaction costs collapsed.
Stage 4 arrived slowly. Gold-backed banknotes in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bills of exchange. London emerged as a clearing center. Gold became the basis for credit creation, not just storage.
Stage 5 was the 19th-century classical gold standard. Central banks held bullion. Currencies promised convertibility. The system standardized globally. After 1944, Bretton Woods formalized dollar-gold convertibility for states at $35 per troy ounce.
Stage 6? Multiple stress tests. WWI broke the first gold standard. The interwar gold exchange standard failed. The Great Depression shattered what remained. Nixon ended convertibility on August 15, 1971, completing gold’s journey from operating system to reserve hedge.
Gold’s challenge set: Portability, divisibility, verification, and inelastic supply. Gold solved trust through physics, but moving atoms across distance is slow and costly.
Gold scaled with mints and ships. Slowly.
The Dollar’s 200-Year Sprint
The dollar’s path was faster because it built on top of existing infrastructure.
Spark: The “financial revolution” in the Netherlands and England seeded modern public debt. The Bank of England’s 1694 charter intertwined state finance with credible paper claims. Revolutionary idea at the time.
Hoarding: Merchants and institutions accumulated short bills and government debt as safe, liquid savings.
Rails: Central banks, legal tender statutes, clearinghouses. Dollar banking scaled with correspondent banking and then global dollar funding.
Financialization: Treasuries evolved into the world’s base collateral. The U.S. repo market became gigantic. Regulators pushed more trades into central clearing to harden the system after stress events.
Reserve: Bretton Woods in 1944 made the dollar central. All currencies pegged to it. The dollar pegged to gold at $35 per ounce. After 1971, even without gold backing, the dollar retained roughly half of SWIFT-tracked international payments, a share that has been steady to slightly rising. That’s network effect in action.
Stress tests: March 2020 was a reminder that even the safest market can seize up without decisive action. Oil shocks, Latin American debt crisis, 1998 LTCM, 2008 GFC. Each crisis expanded the central bank’s toolkit and reaffirmed bonds and the dollar as the global safe-asset core.
The dollar’s challenge set: The state must sustain credibility, manage inflation, and keep the plumbing liquid in crises.
Why faster than gold?
Trust in institutions and law. It scaled with courts, tax power, and central banking, not ships and mints.
Bitcoin’s 15-Year Hyperdrive
Now let’s talk about where Bitcoin is right now.
Spark: 2009 launch. Cypherpunk experiment. From 2009 to mid-2010s, the asset lived as digital gold for a small group of believers.
Hoarding: Early holders treated it as digital gold. High volatility. Thin liquidity. Classic Stage 2.
Rails: Global exchanges, custodians, and wallets arrived. Lightning created a medium-of-exchange layer, though capacity has ebbed in 2025 as the network retools.
Financialization: This is where Bitcoin is right now in 2025.
And the milestone was precise.
On January 10, 2024, the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, which catalyzed large, persistent inflows and made Bitcoin allocation possible inside traditional brokerage accounts. By late 2025, cumulative net inflows and AUM figures show the wrapper has stuck.
The numbers are staggering.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF has accumulated over $50 billion in assets under management in less than a year, making it the largest spot Bitcoin ETF. By April 2025, spot Bitcoin ETFs globally amassed over $65 billion in assets under management. Total 2025 ETF inflows reached nearly $7 billion, with record daily inflows of $1.38 billion following the U.S. election.
Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy holds $77 billion in Bitcoin. Corporate adoption surged with convertible bond financing and 401(k) integration, unlocking an $8.9 trillion capital pool.
Pension funds from Wisconsin, Michigan, the UK, and Australia expanded Bitcoin positions after prices crossed $108,000 in early 2025.
Andreessen Horowitz called 2025 “the year of institutional adoption.” The total crypto market cap topped $4 trillion for the first time. Bitcoin holds more than 50% of global crypto market cap.
This is Stage 4 in full swing.
Stress and settlement (Stage 6 starting): Exchange failures like Mt. Gox and FTX drove painful lessons about custody and counterparty risk. Policy clarity arrived unevenly by jurisdiction, but the arc is toward regulated access.
Trump’s January 23, 2025 executive order mandated a comprehensive federal crypto framework within 180 days and rescinded SAB 121, which previously forced banks to hold customer crypto assets on their balance sheets.
Legal-tender experiments: El Salvador’s 2021 law made Bitcoin legal tender. In 2025, lawmakers amended the regime to make acceptance voluntary. The signal is clear either way. Politics sets boundaries for extra-state money.
Bitcoin is where gold was in the mid-1800s when banks started issuing gold-backed paper, or where the dollar was in the 1920s before Bretton Woods formalized everything.
Same Stages, Same Challenges
The overlaps are striking:
Trust
Gold: purity and weight.
Bonds and dollars: rule of law, tax capacity, lender of last resort.
Bitcoin: code correctness, honest majority of hashpower, and neutral rules that survive for decades.
Custody
From clipped coins to forged bills to lost private keys. Exchange meltdowns are today’s version of 18th-century minting scandals. The lesson is identical: own the asset in a structure that matches your risk tolerance.
Standardization
Gold had mint marks and assays. Treasuries have CUSIPs, clearing rules, and repo conventions. Bitcoin is pushing toward widely accepted accounting, ETF wrappers, and institutional custody standards.
Liquidity in a crisis
The dollar system can expand balance sheets. Gold and Bitcoin are hard-supply assets, so shocks transmit differently. March 2020 forced central bank action in Treasuries. Bitcoin’s liquidity now rides on a mix of spot, derivatives, and ETF market makers that must prove resilience in the next major drawdown.
Where the Paths Diverge
The stages are the same.
The challenges rhyme.
But here’s what’s different:
Elasticity: Fiat can print and backstop. Gold and Bitcoin cannot.
Settlement: Treasuries settle through institutions. Bitcoin settles on-chain with probabilistic finality and scales with layers.
Political alignment: Bonds and the dollar are native to the state. Gold is tolerated. Bitcoin is negotiated.
Plumbing risk: Treasuries face clearing and collateral-chain risk. Bitcoin faces protocol throughput, custody, and on-off-ramp risk. Gold faces logistics risk.
Gold is trust in physics. Slow to move. Hard to debase. Costly to scale across distance.
Bonds and the dollar are trust in institutions and law. They scale with courts, tax power, and central banking.
Bitcoin is trust in code and an open network. It scales with bandwidth, cryptography, and layered architectures. No armies. No courts. No central bank.
That’s the constraint and the opportunity.
What Would “Reaching Dollar Stage” Actually Look Like?
If you’re tracking Bitcoin as an investment, this framework gives you a map.
We’re in Stage 4, deep financialization. Stage 5, reserve adoption, is beginning but incomplete. Stage 6, regulatory settlement, is in progress but will take years.
What would count as Bitcoin reaching the “dollar stage”?
1. Unit of account footprint: Contracts quoted natively in sats, not just Bitcoin-as-converter.
2. Trade invoicing share: A visible slice of cross-border trades priced and settled in Bitcoin without an intermediate fiat leg.
3. Reserve adoption: A nontrivial set of central banks holding Bitcoin systematically, not tactically.
4. Credit plumbing: Robust, through-the-cycle Bitcoin-collateral markets that behave like Treasury repo.
5. Volatility path: Bitcoin’s realized volatility has already dropped by as much as 75% from peak historical levels by mid-2025, attributed to deeper liquidity and “strong hands” from large investors. A structural downshift toward large-cap equity levels is the next milestone.
6. Security economics: A durable fee market as block subsidies keep halving.
Until then, Bitcoin looks most like gold in the late 19th century in narrative, and like an emerging safe asset in the early financialization phase in market structure.
It’s not there yet.
But it’s moving faster than anything in monetary history.
What to Watch
If you build or invest, watch three curves:
Official gold demand as a proxy for geopolitical hedging. Central banks have been persistent net buyers in 2023, 2024, and 2025, motivated by geopolitics and sanction risk. The ECB and World Gold Council both highlight how official demand has climbed to multi-decade highs. That is a structural tailwind, not a meme. It tells you how much the world wants assets with no counterparty.
Treasury plumbing reforms as a proxy for system resilience. They reveal how the core fiat stack handles stress. Watch Fed notes and New York Fed speeches on Treasury market structure.
ETF and Lightning data as a proxy for crypto’s maturation. They show whether Bitcoin is becoming boring in the right ways.
Boring is good.
Boring means infrastructure.
The Rhyme, Not the Repeat
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
Gold’s journey taught us that monetary adoption is a process, not an event.
The dollar’s journey taught us that institutions and law can accelerate that process.
Bitcoin’s journey is teaching us that code and networks can accelerate it even faster.
Same stages.
Different constraints.
Same physics of trust, liquidity, and network effects.
Gold runs on atoms. The dollar runs on institutions. Bitcoin runs on code.
Your strategy should match the substrate you choose to trust.
If you understand the pattern, you’re not guessing about Bitcoin’s future.
You’re watching a playbook that’s been running for 2,700 years.
The only question is: how fast can Bitcoin complete the remaining stages?
Based on what we’ve seen so far?
Faster than anyone thinks possible.
Post-Credit Scene
Something scary for you later today.
and five resources that shaped this piece:
1. Johnny Harris: “Gold Explained, Finally”
Worth your time as cultural and policy backdrop, especially against the surge in official gold demand.
2. “Layered Money” by Nik Bhatia – The best book on how monetary systems stack on top of each other. Gold, dollars, Bitcoin. All layers. All trust hierarchies.
3. Federal Reserve History: Bretton Woods System – Official source on how the dollar became global reserve currency. Dry, essential.
4. World Gold Council and ECB on official gold demand – Current data on central bank buying patterns. Shows you the geopolitical hedge in real-time.
5. SEC filings on spot Bitcoin ETF flows – Raw data on institutional adoption. Watch the cumulative inflows, not the daily noise.
Thanks for reading
Vlad