Why I’m Still Betting on Bitcoin

In 2015, we published “A Value Investor’s Case for…Bitcoin?!” contending that Bitcoin had the potential to become much more valuable whether viewed as a payments processing network or as a substitute for fiat capital. Despite Bitcoin recently hitting new highs against every fiat currency, I believe Bitcoin today is still significantly undervalued and that the world is likely in the early stages of a secular shift around how humans think about capital and its governance.

At its core, money is an accountability system. The challenge with current monetary systems is that humans control them, and human judgement is subject to error and influence. The boundless desire to shift accountability and power ultimately results in currency debasement as politicians and regulators jockey for control and collectively create new units in the process, thereby debasing each unit’s value. However, as Lyn Alden flags in her excellent book Broken Money, history shows that the best monetary technology inevitably wins, as people trade inferior depreciating capital technologies for superior ones that better align with users’ goal of preserving or growing their option set over time.

Humans are notoriously bad at contextualizing the relevance and potential of new technologies, which my dad highlighted here in 2017. This gap is especially wide for groundbreaking concepts of an epistemic nature – that is, inventions that change the way we think about and relate to information and each other. It also explains why NVIDIA, Google and Meta have generated outsized returns relative to other stocks.

Unlike anything we have seen before, Bitcoin is a true technological breakthrough, as there now exists an effectively unalterable, automated and transparent global ledger network with decentralized governance enabling the transfer of property rights through time and space without human permission or the possibility of confiscation. The promise of Bitcoin is simple – namely, that changes in someone’s purchasing power should not be controlled by an authority tied to the circumstances of one’s birth.

What is the intrinsic value of that? No one can say precisely, but my view is that it’s many multiples of its current $1.5 trillion market capitalization in a world of fiat governance systems fast approaching one quadrillion dollars of capital. In other words, Bitcoin still holds a fraction of one percent of the world’s addressable market for capital despite its blockchain being far more accountable and secure than the best fiat monetary governance systems. As a truly groundbreaking technology, Bitcoin is inherently subject to unforeseen developments and changes in perceived value, and it may end up worthless to some, but I believe that continuing to ignore Bitcoin will serve those who do it over the next decade as well as it has over the past one – not well.

It’s still early.

Bill Miller IV, CFA, CMT is the Chairman and CIO of Miller Value Partners and has been accumulating Bitcoin for over a decade.

Bitcoin is a digital token that can be exchanged electronically. It does not exist in physical form. Bitcoins are created and kept track of by a network of computers using mathematical formulas, rather than by a single authority or organization. Fiat currency (“Fiat”) is a government-issued currency that is backed by the government who issued it, as opposed to a physical commodity such as gold or silver.

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