Bitcoin’s Price Surge Mirrors 130 Billion ’Life Years’ of Market Attention—Gold Left Playing Catch-Up

Bitcoin just schooled gold in the attention economy. The crypto’s latest rally aligns with a staggering 130 billion ’life years’ of cumulative human focus—a metric that makes Wall Street’s traditional safe-haven asset look like a relic gathering dust in a vault.

Why it matters: When global adoption becomes a numbers game, Bitcoin’s network effect cuts through legacy finance like a hot knife through butter. Meanwhile, gold bugs are still waiting for their fax machines to deliver price updates.

The kicker? This isn’t just about store-of-value debates anymore. It’s about which asset class can actually keep pace with the speed of human innovation—and which one gets stuck explaining ’physical settlement’ to millennials.

What gives Bitcoin value? A new way to think about it

He argues thatbecause it’s rare, durable, and has been trusted as money for thousands of years. This long track record makes people believe it will keep being valuable, which is called the(the idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep surviving).

, only around since 2009. At first, that made it seem like “digital fool’s gold.” Instead of just counting years, the author suggests we should look at which is how many people have been alive and aware of it during its existence.

Since 2009, humanity has racked up aboutof exposure to Bitcoin, basically the combined time all humans have had to observe and evaluate it.

In contrast, gold has aboutof exposure since 700 BCE. That means Bitcoin has already had aboutas gold, despite being much younger.

Interestingly,($2.1T vs. $21T), which seems to align with the attention-time idea.

If global population trends continue, this “attention share” could grow over time, maybe hitting

The growth rate of Bitcoin’s “Lindy value” WOULD be around, which is slower than certain trading strategies, but still meaningful.

Thiccy argues that this way of thinking,, is a better way to measure Bitcoin’s legitimacy and staying power.

Writers like Dan Held and Vijay Boyapati have regularly invoked the Lindy heuristic, but they treat time in simple calendar years. Others have modeled Google-search volume, Wikipedia views, or social-media buzz and tested how those fluctuations predict short-term price moves. Prior work looks at spikes in attention as a trading signal, not at cumulative attention over Bitcoin’s lifetime.

In short,, but the sheer number of people alive and aware of it makes its survival odds better than they might appear from just a calendar date.

Thiccy’s substack article, which goes into much more detail, including charts, can be read here.