Today at the Hong Kong Bitcoin Asia, the host asked CZ: In the so-called Bitcoin century, what exactly is going to happen over the next 25 years?
CZ’s first reaction was that Bitcoin would reach $1 million—and it doesn’t even need to wait 25 years. He even judged that Bitcoin would ultimately become more important than gold, and the gap could start shrinking rapidly in the next bull cycle.
But after watching the entire half-hour conversation, I realized that the price part is actually the least important.
What CZ is truly betting on are two new demand streams that barely existed before:
Governments around the world begin to include Bitcoin in their strategic reserves, with pension funds and retirement funds entering the picture;
On the other side, billions of AI agents start trading on their own, buying services, and calling compute resources. They naturally need a kind of money that a machine can directly use;
The next part is even more interesting. CZ revealed that he’s already discussed issuing tokens with multiple top-tier AI companies, because training models is only the first step—the real terrifying part is capital expenditure on compute:
According to his claim, a one-gigawatt data center will cost $30–50 billion. Some AI companies are planning for hundreds of gigawatts in the future, and in the end what’s needed totals tens of trillions of dollars.
That’s why data-center tokens emerged: raising capital to build compute capacity. The token can be exchanged for compute and used to pay for subscriptions and AI services. Even AI companies themselves may become new issuers of crypto assets.
So CZ’s outlook for the next decade is actually quite complete:
Humans treat Bitcoin as a reserve asset; AI uses stablecoins and cryptocurrencies to trade; stocks, real estate, minerals, and other assets continue to be tokenized on-chain; and governments start racing to take control of regulation, stablecoins, and the entry points to national-level crypto reserves.
If it really gets to that point, a $1 million Bitcoin isn’t the starting point of the story—it’s more like the result after the entire financial system adopts crypto as infrastructure.
$BTC
CZ’s first reaction was that Bitcoin would reach $1 million—and it doesn’t even need to wait 25 years. He even judged that Bitcoin would ultimately become more important than gold, and the gap could start shrinking rapidly in the next bull cycle.
But after watching the entire half-hour conversation, I realized that the price part is actually the least important.
What CZ is truly betting on are two new demand streams that barely existed before:
Governments around the world begin to include Bitcoin in their strategic reserves, with pension funds and retirement funds entering the picture;
On the other side, billions of AI agents start trading on their own, buying services, and calling compute resources. They naturally need a kind of money that a machine can directly use;
The next part is even more interesting. CZ revealed that he’s already discussed issuing tokens with multiple top-tier AI companies, because training models is only the first step—the real terrifying part is capital expenditure on compute:
According to his claim, a one-gigawatt data center will cost $30–50 billion. Some AI companies are planning for hundreds of gigawatts in the future, and in the end what’s needed totals tens of trillions of dollars.
That’s why data-center tokens emerged: raising capital to build compute capacity. The token can be exchanged for compute and used to pay for subscriptions and AI services. Even AI companies themselves may become new issuers of crypto assets.
So CZ’s outlook for the next decade is actually quite complete:
Humans treat Bitcoin as a reserve asset; AI uses stablecoins and cryptocurrencies to trade; stocks, real estate, minerals, and other assets continue to be tokenized on-chain; and governments start racing to take control of regulation, stablecoins, and the entry points to national-level crypto reserves.
If it really gets to that point, a $1 million Bitcoin isn’t the starting point of the story—it’s more like the result after the entire financial system adopts crypto as infrastructure.
$BTC
