BITCOIN: THE SPEED OF LIBERATION

In 2025, Bitcoin will cross an invisible threshold that will break with the logic of past years. It won't be another halving, nor a new speculative cycle that traders will try to explain with their charts filled with colored lines. It will be something else: a moment when the protocol reaches escape velocity. Like an object that definitively leaves Earth's orbit when it exceeds a certain speed, Bitcoin will tear itself away from its old mode of appreciation and enter a new dimension.

This escape velocity is nothing mystical. It is the product of an implacable mechanism: on the one hand, the programmed scarcity of the asset and the aggregation of an increasingly conscious global demand; on the other, the silent bankruptcy of fiat money, eaten away by inflation, debt, and loss of confidence. When these two forces collide, they create a rupture. And this rupture does not resemble a sudden explosion, but an irreversible takeoff.

For fifteen years, Bitcoin has been interpreted as a speculative asset. It was born in the shadow of cypherpunks, grew up in forums, mocked by economists, fought by bankers, and then reluctantly embraced by the very people who despised it. Every phase of its history has been marked by extreme volatility, by tales of bubbles and crashes, by halvings that punctuated price cycles like clockwork. But all that was childhood. Adolescence is over. 2025 ushers in adulthood.

What's changing isn't the protocol, it hasn't budged an inch, but how the world views it. Until now, Bitcoin was valued as a financial curiosity: a niche asset, strange, exciting, but too risky, comparable to a startup whose future remains uncertain whether it will become Google or end up in a graveyard of forgotten projects. But uncertainty is receding. Adoption is growing. Governments, companies, pension funds, and individuals are all reaching out to what began as an anonymous file shared by a long-lost pseudonym.

Let's look at the facts. There are approximately 100 million millionaires on Earth. There will be, at most, 21 million bitcoins. The division is simple: 0.2 bitcoins per millionaire. This is the stark reality. When everyone wants their share, there won't be enough for everyone. And the battleground they will have to fight on will be price. This simple equation is enough to understand that the current volatility is only a transitory symptom. Mass adoption transforms a monetary startup into a standard of scarcity.

This is why the halving, once the center of gravity of the narrative, is losing its importance. We are approaching 97% of units already issued. The influence of marginal money creation is becoming negligible. The market is no longer vibrating to the rhythm of an algorithmic calendar. From now on, it is structural adoption that guides the price. When a CAC40 company invests 5% of its cash in bitcoin, when a pension fund allocates 2% of its portfolio, when a government decides to make it a strategic reserve, this weighs infinitely more than a few hundred bitcoins mined each day. The real halving is the gradual disappearance of bitcoin available for sale.

So some protest. They claim that Bitcoin has been perverted, captured by Wall Street, swallowed up by ETFs and financial products. This is false. Institutions don't capture Bitcoin. They mutate to adapt to it. An ETF is an overlay. Lightning is an overlay. Overlays don't change the core of the protocol. They organize distribution, they simplify access, they put an interface between the user and the chain. But the basic rule remains: 21 million units, not one more.

Traditional finance can build its cathedrals of derivatives around Bitcoin, but it hasn't touched its cornerstone. A custodian can't manufacture a fake UTXO. A fund manager can't vote to inflate the supply. ETFs offer indirect exposure, but the protocol remains sovereign. The code doesn't ask their opinion. Unlike fiat currencies, whose quantity depends on a central committee that adjusts the knobs according to the times, Bitcoin relies on a mechanical, distributed rule, engraved in thousands of nodes that no one can force to change.

So why this shift in 2025? Because the imbalances in the fiat system are reaching unprecedented intensity. States are living beyond their means. Public debt is exploding. Interest on the American debt represents nearly 30% of federal revenue. In short, a third of taxes are no longer used to finance the future, but to pay for the mistakes of the past. This vicious circle cannot be broken by drastic spending cuts politically suicidal, nor by infinite tax increases, socially explosive. There is only one way out: monetary erosion.

Inflation is not rising supermarket prices. Inflation is the decline in the value of money due to its increased abundance. The more dollars there are, the less each dollar is worth. The more euros there are, the less weight each euro has. And even the masses have unconsciously internalized this basic truth. That's why everyone is looking for a way out. Some take refuge in real estate, but real estate is immobile, heavy, and taxable. Others in gold, but gold is controlled by irrational actors and massively held by central banks. Still others in art, but art is illiquid, fragile, and non-fungible. Then there's the newcomer: Bitcoin. Portable, divisible, rare, and incorruptible.

Collective psychology plays a decisive role. We're all caught between two fires: the desire to buy now, while the price is still relatively low, and the fear of the volatility that shakes the asset. But waiting for the volatility to disappear means agreeing to pay much more. This is the universal dilemma. Today, Bitcoin is still a currency project, a monetary startup, so its price fluctuates according to conflicting visions: some think it's worthless, others that it's worth ten million dollars per unit. This conflict crystallizes into volatility. Tomorrow, when adoption is massive, this conflict will die down. The zero-sum scenario will disappear, leaving only the obvious one. But at that point, the entry ticket will be infinitely higher.

What's at stake in 2025 is also the restoration of moral hazard. For decades, central banks have been acting as anesthesiologists. They inject monetary morphine, they create artificial bubbles, they prevent bad policies from being naturally punished. The result: states incapable of reform, governments addicted to debt, citizens who lose confidence. Bitcoin, as an unalterable standard, reintroduces a constraint. When value is measured by an incorruptible instrument, excesses are punished. Mismanagement is exposed. Discipline returns, not by choice, but by necessity.

This is exactly what a standard should do. Measure, sanction, remind us of reality. Like the meter, like the second, Bitcoin becomes the common rule. It does not replace politics, it does not resolve human conflicts, but it prevents the manipulation of the very basis of exchange. From the moment value is no longer elastic to the whim of a monetary governing body, the economy reorganizes itself on a more solid foundation.

Why Bitcoin and not another “crypto-asset”? Because it’s simple. Five sentences are enough to define it: It’s digital. It’s solid, impossible to counterfeit. It’s exchangeable peer-to-peer. It’s decentralized, governed by distributed code. It’s limited to twenty-one million potential units. Nothing more. No industrial promises, no parasitic features, no manipulable governance. Other cryptocurrencies add complexity, dreaming of being platforms, universal machines, solutions to everything. But to be a monetary standard, it must be naked, clear, and unambiguous. Industrial use pollutes monetary use. This is why oil, though precious, cannot be a currency: its price depends on its industrial use. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has only one use: to store and measure value. It is precisely this austerity that gives it its strength.

Escape velocity, then, is the moment when all these forces converge. Absolute scarcity. Growing adoption. The failure of fiat. Institutional demand. The collective awareness that paper money is no longer a store of value. It's the moment when Bitcoin ceases to be seen as a speculative option and becomes an indispensable asset. No need to believe it. Just observe. When corporate balance sheets list it alongside cash, when pension funds include it as diversification, when individuals use it as a long-term reserve, then liberation has been achieved.

And from there, there's no turning back. Like a rocket reaching escape velocity, Bitcoin will never fall back into its old orbit. Halving-based cycles will be a thing of the past. Violent crashes will be absorbed by structural buyers. The price will no longer follow a chaotic curve, but a sustainable slope. Not linear, not without bumps, but irreversible.

It's up to each person to decide where they want to stand. Some want to remain spectators, waiting for the evidence to become clear. They'll pay a high price, but they'll sleep soundly. Others prefer to take the risk now, in the midst of the turmoil, to own an asset that's still undervalued. There's no universally right answer. There's a choice. But that choice is binary: enter before liberation, or after.

In 2025, the time for betting will be over. There will remain the time for allocations. The cypherpunks who believed from the start will have already passed the baton. Institutions will continue to build overlays. States will negotiate their balance of power with a standard that doesn't ask their opinion. And individuals, for their part, will still have the opportunity to hold their key in hand, to write themselves directly into history.

Escape velocity isn't a slogan. It's a physical, economic, and psychological dynamic. It's the moment when Bitcoin is no longer defined by its opponents as a bubble, but accepted as a given. It's the moment when the protocol ceases to be a speculative object and becomes an implicit benchmark. And once that threshold is crossed, there's no going back. You want to act before or after that threshold. There's no third way.