The post
On 30 December 2010, on a forum almost nobody read, Hal Finney wrote down what he thought bitcoin would end up being. He was not guessing from the outside. He had received the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto twenty-three months earlier.
His argument started from a limitation rather than a hope. Bitcoin, he said, "cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the blockchain." Something lighter would have to sit on top. And then the conclusion:
"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the 'high-powered money' that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as, well, as Bitcoin-based purchases are today."
He also said he saw bitcoin "ultimately becoming a reserve currency for banks, playing much the same role as gold did in the early days of banking."
Read that again with a 2026 balance sheet in front of you.
What has actually been built
Three layers now sit between bitcoin and the people who own exposure to it.
The first is the exchange-traded fund. US spot bitcoin ETFs held $102.5 billion of assets as of 18 September. A shareholder there owns a security. Creations and redemptions run through authorised participants, and since an SEC order in July 2025 they can happen in kind, but the mechanism belongs to the fund, not to the shareholder. No individual withdraws a coin.
The second is the treasury company. Strategy held 846,000 BTC as of 20 September, at an aggregate purchase price of $63.80 billion and an average cost of $75,416, having bought 950 coins that week at $79,670. A shareholder owns equity. There is no basket, no authorised participant and no redemption path at all.
The third layer is the newest and the most Finney-shaped. Strategy funds part of that position with perpetual preferred stock. Its variable-rate series pays 12.00 percent a year in semi-monthly cash dividends of fifty cents a share, with the rate reset monthly to keep the price near its $100 par. It traded around $97.75 in early September. It is explicitly not collateralised by the company's bitcoin; the holder has a preferred claim on residual assets and a stream of cash.
So: a scarce base asset at the bottom, instruments issued against it above, and the overwhelming majority of holders never touching the base. That is not a loose analogy to what Finney wrote. That is the thing he wrote.
The reserve-institute framing, and where it goes wrong
The argument that prompted this piece was put by Yves Choueifaty of TOBAM in an interview published on 20 September, and the structural half of it is sharp.
An ordinary company competes on its asset side. A reserve institution does the opposite: it holds the dullest asset imaginable, a vault of metal or a wallet of coins, and does all of its inventing on the liability side, because the whole business is finding new ways to issue claims that let it hold more of the boring thing. By that test Strategy is not behaving like a software company that happens to own bitcoin. It is behaving like a reserve institution.
We think that is right, and it is the useful part of the argument.
The history attached to it is not right, and we are not going to pass it along. The claim is that the Bank of England in 1694 and the Banque de France in 1800 were founded as companies that raised capital in order to buy gold. Neither was.
The Bank of England was chartered in 1694 because the English government could not fund the rebuilding of the Royal Navy during the Nine Years' War. It raised £1.2 million within twelve days of opening, at 8 percent plus a £4,000 annual service charge, from roughly 1,268 subscribers drawn mostly from London's merchant class. William and Mary each subscribed the £10,000 maximum. It was war finance.
The Banque de France was established on 18 January 1800 by Bonaparte, then First Consul, as a private-sector corporation meant to stabilise French finances, and received the exclusive right to issue paper money in Paris in 1803. Its famous gold position came more than a century later: after the First World War it accumulated reserves that peaked at 28.3 percent of the world's gold stock.
The correction matters, but notice what survives it. Both institutions were privately owned issuers of paper against reserves, for roughly two and a half centuries and a century and a half respectively, and both were nationalised within about a year of each other at the end of the Second World War, France in 1945 and Britain in 1946. If you are looking for a precedent for a listed company that accumulates a reserve asset and issues instruments against it, that is the precedent. It is a better one than the founding myth, because it comes with an ending attached.
What we could not stand behind
Two things were offered that we are not repeating as fact.
The first is the $700,000 figure. The number is real and it belongs to Larry Fink: at Davos in January 2025 he said sovereign wealth funds allocating 2 to 5 percent to bitcoin could support a range of $500,000 to $700,000. What he did not publish is the derivation we were given for it, a three-variable regression of bitcoin against gold, the Nasdaq and US M3. Analysts do run models of that family and the observation underneath, that bitcoin has lagged gold and the Nasdaq this year while broad money kept growing, is checkable on its own terms. But an allocation scenario and a regression output are two different claims, and letting them borrow each other's authority is how a plausible number becomes a fake one.
The second is an anecdote that a well-known developer keeps a standing bid for all 21 million coins at one dollar, offered as proof that bitcoin cannot go to zero. We could not source it. It also would not prove the point: a standing bid is not a floor, because the bidder can withdraw it.
The uncomfortable part
There is a cost buried in Finney's world, and the interview states it more bluntly than we would have.
In a country where your savings are not at risk of being taken, the argument runs, keeping coins on your own key is not worth the operational trouble and the personal danger, and the speaker says he holds none directly, only funds. The defence offered is that self-custody works like deterrence: the capacity to walk out disciplines custodians whether or not anybody actually walks.
We published that argument on 15 September and said in print that we were not attributing it to anyone, because we could not find a public source for it. We can now, and this is it.
We said then that we were not asserting the causal claim, and we still are not. But the same piece carried a counting exercise, and it is the part that bites here: roughly 2.5 million BTC, more than twelve percent of supply, already sits in ETFs and listed treasury vehicles where no end holder can withdraw a coin. A deterrent has a constituency, and this one is shrinking. "The option is enough" is also precisely what people say right up until the option is quietly withdrawn.
That is not an argument against the structure being built. It is an argument for watching the share of supply that sits behind a redemption process rather than behind a private key, and for treating that number as a health metric rather than an adoption metric.
What this changes for our view
Nothing about this week, and something about the decade.
We moved our short-term view to bullish bias this morning, on a band break, with a stated price condition that would take it back. That is a trading-horizon judgement made on trading-horizon evidence.
This is a different clock. Our long-term horizon has been strongly bullish throughout the drawdown, and the reason has never been a price target. It is that the ownership structure keeps moving in one direction, and the instruments keep getting better at absorbing demand from people who cannot or will not hold the asset itself.
Finney's prediction is not a bullish argument by itself. It is a description of what happens to a scarce base asset once things get built on top of it, and the historical precedent he reached for, gold in the early days of banking, ended with the reserve institutions in government hands. Whether the price follows depends on demand. Whether the project keeps what makes it worth holding depends on whether the exit stays open.
This is general market commentary, not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.