A single dollar invested in Bitcoin in 2015, when it traded at approximately $300, would have been worth roughly $303 by late 2025 at prices around $91,000, a 30,000% gain that included multiple drawdowns of 60–80% along the way, among them a 76.9% collapse in 2022. The S&P 500, the instrument into which most retail savings are directed through pension mandates, index funds, and the default investment architecture of the modern employment contract, delivered an average annualized return of 9.96% from 1928 to 2025, with inflation-adjusted returns falling to 6.69%.
The most important capital allocation question of the present moment, is what exactly are we measuring when we measure wealth in dollars? In a world where most of us equate debt with money, this is a question that hardly gets asked. We compare stocks, bonds, property and other assets as though the monetary unit in which their prices are expressed were a neutral measuring stick, when it isn't. Bitcoin represents the only monetary technology available that cannot be debased to fund the valuation of the next generation of bread and circuses. It is not a perfect instrument but it is the only financial asset in existence whose supply cannot be expanded by committee decision to make the next trillion-dollar listing appear affordable. Bitcoin isn’t a company and therefore generates no cash flows. In the hierarchy of conversational prestige, owning Bitcoin in 2026 is considerably less interesting than telling people you got in early on the SpaceX IPO.
The business of the fiat casino is to ensure that inflation-created liquidity, flows through the stock market rather than into the kind of genuine capital formation; savings, investment in productive enterprise, the patient accumulation of real wealth, that would make the public less dependent on the performance of assets they do not actually control. There is one exit from this architecture, and it is the one that the financial establishment consistently works to marginalize, discredit, and ultimately control.
The retail investor who participates is not entering a marketplace, but they are entering a casino in which the chips are denominated in a currency whose supply is controlled by the house. SpaceX at $1.75 trillion, OpenAI at $1.2 trillion, Anthropic at $965 billion; these are not prices discovered by the voluntary interaction of informed buyers and sellers assessing the discounted value of future productive output. They are prices produced by years of artificially suppressed interest rates, filtered through the concentrated capital of state-adjacent institutional investors, validated by the narrative requirements of a national security establishment with a strategic interest in AI supremacy, and finally presented to the retail public as investment opportunities.
The productive individual must create something that another human being voluntarily values. The investor must take risk and allocate scarce capital toward productive enterprise but the monetary system itself can expand the supply of the unit in which all of that value is measured. So the million dollar question is, what happens to capital allocation when the measuring stick itself is politically elastic? Instead of just asking which asset will outperform, Bitcoin invites a more fundamental question: What kind of money do I want my wealth measured in?
That may ultimately be the most important capital-allocation question of all.