Crypto OG Hal Finney Predicted Bitcoin Price To Reach $10 Million 17 Years Ago — Now Analysts Say He May Be Right ⋆ ZyCrypto

Before the bold predictions that Bitcoin (BTC) would reach seven figures, cryptography pioneer Hal Finney forecast a valuation of $10 million per coin in 2009. Nearly two decades later, several crypto analysts have theorized that the largest cryptocurrency is headed toward $10 million.

Hal Finney Forecasts $10 Million Bitcoin Price

Barely one week after Bitcoin went live in 2009, pioneering cryptographer Hal Finney predicted the cryptocurrency would reach a $10 million valuation. Finney shared his thoughts on a cryptography mailing list in January 2009, when Bitcoin did not even have a formal market price.

In his post, Finney conducted an “amusing thought experiment,” imagining that newly created Bitcoin becomes the dominant global payment system. He argued that if Bitcoin is adopted globally, the assets’ total value will be on par with the total value of all the world’s wealth.

Finney’s hypothesis cited estimates from 2009 pegging the global wealth at between $200 trillion and $300 trillion. Leaning on the numbers and Bitcoin’s 21 million coin supply, Finney forecasted that Bitcoin could be priced at $10 million.

“So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 to 1,” said Hal. “Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against?”

Since Finney’s forecast in early 2009, Bitcoin has surged by over 1,000,000% to set an all-time high of over $126K. The cryptocurrency is inching toward mainstream acceptance, underscored by heavy institutional accumulation and regulatory approvals in leading jurisdictions. At the time of Finney’s death in 2014, BTC traded below $1,000.

Calls For $10 Million BTC Price Surge

At the moment, several analysts have tipped Bitcoin to reach seven figures, mirroring Hal Finney’s 2009 prediction. Strategy founder Michael Saylor declared that Bitcoin is on course to reach $10 million per coin with the market cap surging from $2 trillion to $200 trillion over two decades.

Back in 2019, analysts at Lucid predicted Bitcoin would trade at $10 million but did not provide a timeline for the price target. Meanwhile, analysts at asset manager VanEck forecast a $53 million valuation per BTC by 2050, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29%.