Bitcoin at $1.2M Would Match Dollar M2, a Viral Slide Deck Says

A slide deck circulating on Instagram this week attaches a price to the flippening, the point at which bitcoin's total value would match a whole currency's money supply. Six figures run from $214,000 per BTC for the British pound up to $2.8 million for the Chinese yuan. None of the slides shows its workings. Bitcoin traded near $77,400 on Saturday, which puts the smallest of those numbers at a little under three times the current price. Most of the arithmetic holds up.

What the post claims

Each slide pairs a currency symbol with a target. In the order the deck runs them:

$214,000 per BTC to overtake the British pound
$499,000 per BTC to overtake the Japanese yen
$943,000 per BTC to overtake the euro area
$1.2 million per BTC to overtake the US dollar
$1.6 million per BTC to match global gold reserves
$2.8 million per BTC to overtake the Chinese yuan

The captions wrapped around them are the author's reading, not reported fact. One slide calls the dollar level the moment "one Bitcoin buys the equivalent of an entire domestic US dollar liquidity pool." Another says decentralized code would outvalue decades of central bank easing. Those are claims by the author. The numbers underneath them are arithmetic, and arithmetic can be repeated.

Running the same sums

The implied method is broad money divided by bitcoin's circulating supply. FXMacroData's M2 table, current to 31 August, puts United States M2 at $23.2 trillion for July, euro area M2 at 16.46 trillion euros for July, Japan at 1,296 trillion yen for August, China at 355.5 trillion yuan for July and the United Kingdom at 3.24 trillion pounds for July. Convert those at the European Central Bank's reference rates for 10 September, then divide by the 20.08 million BTC that CoinGecko listed as circulating on Saturday. Four of the six land close to the deck. The pound comes out near $218,000 against the slide's $214,000, the euro area near $952,000 against $943,000, and the dollar at about $1.16 million against $1.2 million.

The yen figure does not reconcile

Japan is where the deck drifts. Bank of Japan M2 of 1,296 trillion yen, converted at the ECB's 10 September rate of roughly 154 yen to the dollar, is $8.4 trillion, or about $419,000 per BTC. The slide says $499,000. That is a gap of close to a fifth, and a stronger yen assumption baked in when the graphic was made would explain it. We could not establish which rate the author used. The yuan slide drifts the same way and by less, working out near $2.64 million on the ECB rate against the $2.8 million printed.

Gold is the line with outside support

The gold figure is the only one other parties have published recently. 8marketcap put the above-ground gold stock at $30.5 trillion on Saturday, which is about $1.52 million per BTC. Changpeng Zhao used $31 trillion at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong and arrived at $1.54 million, according to a Blockhead account of the session on 8 September. Neither matches the $1.6 million on the slide, though both sit within about five percent of it. Zhao also offered a much lower bar, around $697,000, counting only the investable portion of the gold stock. That second figure appears nowhere in the Instagram post.

"Bitcoin will definitely overtake gold in terms of importance," Zhao said, in remarks Blockhead reported on 8 September.

What the framing leaves out

A market capitalization is not a pool of money waiting to be spent. Reaching any of these levels would mean buyers absorbing bitcoin's $1.55 trillion valuation and multiplying it many times over, while the aggregates on the other side of the comparison keep growing. The two assets have been moving closer together in the meantime, with a 90-day gold correlation above 50% earlier this year. The deck closes by asking readers where the flipping stops. It does not mention that every target it prints is recalculated the moment a central bank publishes again.