Bitcoin vs the rest of the world: the dentist edition

Who would have thought that, if history had taken a slightly different turn, teeth might have become a store of value? “My teeth are pretty scarce, and pretty useful, but they’re not worth billions of bucks,” Financial Times columnist Katie Martin quips in a recent (and passionate) documentary about Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the publicly listed company that has made Bitcoin acquisition its core business. The video makes one thing clear: despite covering the topic for years, Martin remains deeply sceptical of Bitcoin’s worth.

Today, a single Bitcoin trades above $100,000, while Martin’s 32 teeth do not have a market value (at least not a public one). Her perspective, which she is of course entitled to, is still not that surprising, given how mainstream financial media has long dismissed or ignored Bitcoin’s investment thesis.

Bitcoin still disrespected 15 years after its launch

From Bitcoin’s early, non-fiat days to its current trillion-dollar market cap, FT readers might have found their subscriptions far more valuable had they been given consistent, serious coverage of the asset’s fundamentals. But we’re speaking about an industry—which I come from—that took over a decade to acknowledge that the Internet was more appealing to younger generations than printed paper. 

So here we are: 15 years after Bitcoin’s launch, with a market capitalization of $2 trillion, and it’s still being compared to a columnist’s molars. Oddly, gold’s market cap is rarely questioned—despite the fact that its value isn’t derived from conductivity, but from centuries-old tradition and the fact that it was once minted into coins.

As has been written many times on CoinShares pages (and elsewhere), Bitcoin shares far more characteristics with gold than with teeth. For one, Bitcoin is immutable—unlike teeth, which can rot.

We wouldn’t go quite as far as following Michael Saylor’s infamous advice to “sell a tooth if you must” to buy Bitcoin—but honestly, using your FT subscription money to purchase some satoshis might be worth considering. Had you started 15 years ago, that decision might have financed a lifetime of appointments at the best dental clinic in the world. We will maintain our subscription, though, as we still applaud the efforts to cover the topic of Bitcoin.