Bitcoin price aligns with its 130 billion ‘life years’ of attention compared to gold

The pseudonymous co-founder of ScimitarCapital, Thiccy, shared a novel theory on Bitcoin price appreciation Tuesday by comparing Bitcoin’s global attention to that of gold.

What gives Bitcoin value? A new way to think about it

He argues that gold is valuable because it’s rare, durable, and has been trusted as money for thousands of years. This long track record makes people believe it will keep being valuable, which is called the Lindy effect (the idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep surviving).

Bitcoin is much newer, only around since 2009. At first, that made it seem like “digital fool’s gold.” Instead of just counting years, the author suggests we should look at “attention time,” which is how many people have been alive and aware of it during its existence.

Since 2009, humanity has racked up about 130 billion “life-years” of exposure to Bitcoin, basically the combined time all humans have had to observe and evaluate it.

In contrast, gold has about 1.3 trillion life-years of exposure since 700 BCE. That means Bitcoin has already had about 10% as much human attention as gold, despite being much younger.

Bitcoin life years (Source: Thiccy)

Interestingly, Bitcoin’s market cap is about 10% of gold’s ($2.1T vs. $21T), which seems to align with the attention-time idea.

If global population trends continue, this “attention share” could grow over time, maybe hitting 12.8% by 2030, 15.7% by 2035, and 18.4% by 2040

The growth rate of Bitcoin’s “Lindy value” would be around 5.5% per year, which is slower than certain trading strategies, but still meaningful.

Thiccy argues that this way of thinking, weighing time by how many people are paying attention, is a better way to measure Bitcoin’s legitimacy and staying power.

Writers like Dan Held and Vijay Boyapati have regularly invoked the Lindy heuristic, but they treat time in simple calendar years. Others have modeled Google-search volume, Wikipedia views, or social-media buzz and tested how those fluctuations predict short-term price moves. Prior work looks at spikes in attention as a trading signal, not at cumulative attention over Bitcoin’s lifetime.

In short, Bitcoin is still new, but the sheer number of people alive and aware of it makes its survival odds better than they might appear from just a calendar date.

Thiccy’s substack article, which goes into much more detail, including charts, can be read here.

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