Jimmy Song – Why Bitcoin Price Keeps Pumping | BTC Prague 2025 Keynote

Everyone has a Bitcoin regret story. The real question isn’t why you didn’t buy more — it’s whether you would have had the conviction to hold. On the BTC Prague stage, I broke down the one valuation model that actually explains why Bitcoin’s price keeps going up — and why it’s still not too late.

The Regret Story We All Share

Back in 2001, during my second visit to Prague, I was looking at a stock trading at $18 a share. The company held more cash than its entire market valuation. I didn’t buy it. That stock was Apple — shortly after Steve Jobs returned. Had I held from then until now, I’d have made 600 times my money.

But here’s the thing: almost everyone I know has a similar story about Bitcoin. Whether they first heard about it at $1, $100, or $10,000 — they all wish they’d bought more. The problem is, that’s a bit of a false narrative. Holding is incredibly hard without genuine conviction.

The Easy Answer and the Hard One

Why does Bitcoin’s price keep going up? The easy answer: fixed supply, increasing demand, and price as the only release valve. But if you want real conviction, you need to go deeper — into what makes that scarcity credible over the long term.

Almost everything has elastic supply. When Nintendo Switch 2 launched and sold out, scalpers listed it for $675 instead of $500. But that gap closes fast because Nintendo simply makes more. Bitcoin cannot do that. The difficulty adjustment ensures that no matter how much mining power enters the network, the same amount of Bitcoin comes to market every two weeks. More effort doesn’t produce more coins.

Absolute Scarcity Is Rare

Van Gogh sold only a few thousand dollars worth of paintings in his lifetime. Today his catalog is worth around $30 billion. Why? Because he died — and no new supply was ever possible. Bitcoin achieves something similar, but through code and consensus rather than death. Nodes audit the supply with every new block. No single decision-maker can inflate it. That’s not true of any altcoin, where a centralized team controls the supply schedule — making them valued more like stocks, dependent on new promises and new markets.

Ethereum went from “world computer” to ICOs to DeFi to NFTs to the metaverse. Each narrative cycle required new believers. When the promises aren’t kept, the price falls. Memecoins are just the logical endpoint — valuation based entirely on finding new buyers to dump on.

The Real Valuation Model

For Bitcoin, the valuation model is simple: trust in long-term credible scarcity. The more people store value in Bitcoin, the higher the price goes — because supply stays capped. Central banks have made planning for the future incredibly difficult by injecting themselves into every asset class. Bitcoin sits outside that system. Its scarcity is absolute, held together by nodes, community, and consensus — with no single actor incentivized to betray that trust for personal gain.

It’s Still Not Too Late

Because most people haven’t yet internalized what absolute scarcity really means, Bitcoin remains mispriced relative to its true valuation model. That means it’s still rational to buy. My suggestion: start small. Even 1% of a portfolio is enough to get skin in the game. Then do the work — study the difficulty adjustment, learn what running a node does, understand the social and technical layers that keep Bitcoin decentralized.

Conviction comes from understanding. Without it, you’ll sell at the first dip. With it, you’ll hold through the volatility and avoid the regret story you’ll otherwise be telling in another ten years.