Number Go Up Technology is a meme that’s been around in bitcoin for a number of years. It basically means that bitcoin is guaranteed to continually rise in price over time simply due to its inherent properties.
Why is the price going up today? Number Go Up Technology
Why should you buy bitcoin? Number Go Up Technology
The phrase actually originates from the meme of Number Go Up, which is just a self deprecating way of describing why you own bitcoin. Rather than get into the details of monetary debasement, government spending, control of the money supply, and the history of finance, it’s simple to just say that the price is going up, so why wouldn’t you own some?
So let’s look at why exactly will bitcoin’s price is going up forever.
With a limited supply of tokens, and an unlimited supply of people who can own an unlimited number of coins, it should become more desirable over time. Basic supply and demand dynamics.
The core element of Bitcoin’s NGU tech is the fact that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. The limited supply aspect is what attracts people to bitcoin, and when demand rises, it’s impossible to make more to meet demand. That is Number Go Up technology.
Is NGU Legit Or Just A Meme?
Number Go Up A Joke & Shouldn’t Be Taken Seriously
Number Go Up is really just a funny meme used among bitcoiners to blow off steam during bear markets, or to dunk on nocoiners during bull markets.
It’s important to not take the meme too seriously because the thing is, bitcoin’s number doesn’t always go up. If you bought in December 2017 or November 2021, bitcoin’s number went down. Way down. 85% down. NGU didn’t really work in your favor. Even if you bought in Q4 2017 and held your coin until today (Feb 2023), you’d still be barely up 50%. It’s not really the powerful NGU Tech like you expected, right?
Telling friends and family that bitcoin’s price always goes up, or is guaranteed to go up is a great way to piss people off as well. If you’re reading this article, you probably have at least a basic understanding of what bitcoin is and why you should own some. 95% of people in the world simply have no clue, and although you may be a beginner, you’re still way ahead of that crowd in terms of understanding bitcoin.
That 95% are the people who buy into the peak bull markets and sell at the bottom. Because they have no foundational understanding of why bitcoin has value, and they join for the NGU, and leave once NGU fails. This is why the whole “buy bitcoin to get rich” isn’t exactly a great pitch for most people. There needs to be some other kind of substantial reasoning why someone buys bitcoin, because number doesn’t always go up over the short period.
Number Go Up Is Real, And The Only Thing That Matters
There is a decent argument, however, that although Number Go Up Technology started as a joke, the logic behind it is real, and very important to the adoption of bitcoin as a global monetary network. In other words, bitcoin having a continually rising price over a long period of time is needed in order to become a global store of value, and then global medium of exchange.
Bitcoin has the basic function of being able to send information through the internet without the need to be verified by a third party. It’s units are unforgeable and limited in supply, and these qualities are foundational to its value prop.
Prices of commodities fluctuate up and down in any market: corn, soybeans, pork bellies, gold… and now bitcoin. That’s just how open markets work. Price changes attract speculators, creating a deeper, and more liquid market.
As The Number Of Users Grows, The Value Per Coin Increases
Each cycle of boom and bust attracts new speculators, new hodlers, and a new tier of investors. While someone in 2011 might have been crazy to own just $10,000 in bitcoin, these days, it’s quite a small amount, and it wouldn’t even move the market to market buy $100,000 or more.
As more users come to the system, different types of investors of various calibers will choose to invest.
As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Regardless of intraday trading, as number of users goes up, so does number of dollars, and thus liquidity. Bigger investors with deeper pockets buy more and more bitcoin, creating more liquidity in the market, and paving the way for even more investors. What’s next? Institutions. Banks. Countries. Central banks. Yes. It’s all on the table. But it’s all reliant on the number continuing to go up.
We’re all familiar with bitcoin’s epic crashes and deep bear markets, but if the price continued to decline for a decade or more, the narrative of protecting your purchasing power over time would die a slow death. No one but the true bitcoin diehards would continue to purchase bitcoin for censorship resistant transactions, but we’d lose all those liquid trading markets and large investors.
Every Day That Bitcoin Hasn’t Collapsed, It Justifies A Higher Price
The question of whether or not bitcoin will continue to go up is one of probability. Nobody knows for sure what will happen in the future, but what is more likely to happen, and what is less likely to happen?
Considering that Bitcoin is the only censorship resistant digital money with a verifiably limited supply. It’s the only cryptocurrency that has any chance of becoming an global monetary standard. In a world where people are waking up to the idea of corporate censorship and government surveillance, is it more or less likely that interest in owning some amount of bitcoin will increase over time?
As it becomes easier to buy bitcoin through smartphone apps Is it more or less likely that people will allocate a small amount of their savings in bitcoin through “rounding up” purchases, credit card rewards, or stacking sats? How likely is it that investors will put as little as 1% of their investments into bitcoin as it continues to refuse to die year after year?
For me, the answer is that it is more likely that those things will continue to happen, and grow in number and size, so I’m a believer in NGU.
Every day that goes by and Bitcoin hasn’t collapsed due to legal or technical problems, that brings new information to the market. It increases the chance of Bitcoin’s eventual success and justifies a higher price
Hal Finney
Is Number Go Up Only About The Price?
The best bitcoin memes persist, and the Number Go Up has taken on new meaning in recent years. Though the original meaning of the joke was purely about price speculation, long term bitcoiners have applied it to other parts of the network, as a way of always looking for something positive.
It can be a real drag to watch your wealth plummet 90% during a bear market, so what else can we look at besides the dollar value of your bitcoin stack?
More Numbers Going Up In Bitcoin
What else is “going up” in the bitcoin ecosystem?
- Number of daily on-chain and lightning transactions
- Number of entities holding at least 0.1 or 1.0 bitcoin
- Number of addresses
- Number of jobs at bitcoin companies
- Number of businesses accepting bitcoin
- Number of conferences & attendee numbers
- Hashrate
- Number of developers on bitcoin (including lightning)
- Private bitcoin usage (whirlpool, joinmarket)
- Block height (bitcoin still isn’t dead)
- Number of nodes
Everything is kind of intertwined. Bitcoin is going through it’s adoption phase, and although normie public interest waxes and wanes along with the short term price movements. the long term trajectory of bitcoin is up and to the right.
Though the price of bitcoin is important for it’s journey toward global adoption, and important to proving itself as a long term store of value, there are many other aspects of the network you can inspect to prove to yourself that the network is in fact, still growing. Despite temporary, unhappy dips in price action, the bitcoin network grows larger and more entrenched by the day.
If you think about it, actually, the real NGU is the supply of fiat money. The number of dollars in economy will continually inflate over time. Literally. Inflation is baked into fiat technology. That’s what it’s meant to do. Bitcoin will remain fixed at 21 million, making it an excellent alternative to fiat.
5 Bitcoin IRA Companies And Options To Get Bitcoin In Retirement Accounts
Leave a Reply