SWIFT, which is controlled by the US, and exclusion from SWIFT would be tantamount to near-complete isolation from the international financial system (witness Iran). This is an increasingly untenable situation for many sovereigns, particularly as the global power and influence of the US wanes. A non-sovereign, non-fiat, trustless, censorship-resistant cryptoasset would be a far better alternative for most foreign currency international reserves. IMF SDRs are already a synthetic store of value, so could also be easily and sensibly replaced by such a cryptoasset. Building on our gold bullion analysis above to put some numbers around the potential implications for the network value of our monetary store-of-value cryptoasset, we might assume that it replaces somewhere between 0.25x and 0.75x of non-gold international reserves. My low-end assumption is fairly arbitrary but my high-end assumption reflects the likelihood that states will want to diversify their foreign reserves to some extent as they already do in holding fiat currencies other than the USD. These assumptions would add a further USD 2.8 – 8.5 trillion in value to our dominant monetary store-of-value cryptoasset. Adding these amounts to our gold bullion-based numbers above gives a total potential value 29 range for our dominant monetary store-of-value cryptoasset of USD 4.7 – 14.6 trillion. I’ll stop there for now, but there are two further upsides that I haven’t explicitly taken into account. First, it could make sense for such a cryptoasset to replace the USD as the standard unit of account for global trade and commodity prices. Trade- and commodity-centric firms may therefore choose to capitalise themselves in such a cryptoasset, creating further demand for its limited supply, mitigated by the inevitable emergence of fractional reserve banking and bond markets denominated in the cryptoasset which would increase its money multiplier. Second, such a cryptoasset will likely be used for some payments, such as international payments or domestic payments in countries without stable sovereign currencies (where this is already happening). This latter potential is at least somewhat, if not fully, captured in the high end of the range above in the sense that, when we start thinking about this cryptoasset store of value representing a multiple of private gold bullion holdings, we are implicitly already accounting for some displacement of physical cash holdings.30 As explained in the previous section, the incremental sum-of-parts value contribution from the payments functionality arguably won’t be that significant compared to the store-of-value component, so ignoring it here probably doesn’t very materially impact the potential value target. The next question is, which cryptocurrency has the highest probability today of becoming the dominant store of value? It seems to me that the probable answer based on the information in our possession today is Bitcoin (BTC). It has more users; has decentralised (to the point of dysfunctional) governance; has more hashing power than any other crypto; is highly stable and robust; has been around longest; and has never been hacked. Other cryptoassets may have features that Bitcoin doesn’t have that are useful in sundry use cases other than store of value, but store of value is a simple functionality (perhaps the simplest of all the cryptoasset use cases), and Bitcoin has been and continues to acquit that functionality flawlessly. Critics point to the conflictual politics that complicate changes to Bitcoin’s code, but seen purely through a monetary-store-of-value lens, that can be seen as more of a feature than a bug. It seems to me that it is far more likely that Bitcoin becomes the dominant store-of-value crypto than some other existing or future contender that isn’t Bitcoin. If Bitcoin were to become the dominant monetary store of value cryptoasset, based on my total mature network value 29 Total international reserves of USD 12.6 trillion, of which 89% non-gold reserves = USD 11.3 trillion. Low end: USD 11.3 trillion x 25% = USD 2.8 trillion; high end: USD 11.3 trillion x 75% = USD 8.5 trillion. 30 To give some bounded idea of the potential value of displacement of some domestic fiat currency holdings, global M0 is about USD 5 trillion, so we’d be talking about a relatively small fraction of that. 19