Cities live longer
"It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company." - Geoffrey West, physicist, The Santa Fe Institute, author of Scale.
“The mean life of companies is 10 years…Cities are the crucible of civilization.They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation.”
Bitcoin is not like a company, that usually has a relatively short existence measured in decades. It is more like a city and is built to last, to the year 2140 when the last Sat has been minted, and beyond. It behaves as a power law, it is anti-fragile and Lindy as a result of its inspired design and multiple feedback loops.
Companies are top down organizations, whereas Bitcoin is more like a vibrant growing city. Like cities, it has grown organically, in a bottom up fashion, but in accordance with the beautifully designed Nakamoto decentralized consensus protocol. Cities last for centuries, contain many networks, and adhere to power laws. Bitcoin also contains many networks, and adheres to power laws and can be expected to persist for many decades, even centuries.
Companies

Companies behave as exponentials and may grow super exponentially early on in their lives then move to slower exponential growth and later flatten out before falling and failing, also in an exponential manner. Within a decade or two or three they may be acquired or spin off portions of their business or go bankrupt. Exponential behavior is inherently less stable, and in nature is found in nuclear decay and animal population boom and bust behavior, as well as in markets.
While cities live for centuries, companies live only for decades. The average lifetime is just over 10 years, according to a study by Daepp, Hamilton, West, and Bettencourt, who analyzed 25,000 North America companies during a 60 year window. They found that lifetimes are exponentially distributed, as evidenced in Figure 1, and with an average lifetime 10.5 years. And that average lifetime doesn’t vary that much from one industry to another.
Altcoins, the vast majority of which have no proof of work underpinning their growth, are more like companies than cities. They are not built to last to the degree that Bitcoin is, since they are not built on that strong foundation of proof of work.
Cities
Networks in Cities:
1. Water Network
2. Electricity Network
3. Gas Network
4. Telephone Network
5. Cable/internet network
6. Road network
7. Train/subway network
8. Public bus network
9. Regulatory and Legal Network
10. Police, Fire, Emergencies Network
11. Hospitals and Health Care Network …
Cities consist of a slew of networks needed for infrastructure, transportation, and public services. All of these underly the vitality, creativity, opportunity, productivity, and cultural dynamism of a city. They are superlinear constructs with a great advantage of scale. That advantage takes the form of a power law.
It has been demonstrated by Geoffrey West and collaborators that the infrastructure cost for a city scales as the 0.85 power of its population. Yet the GDP and other key measures of output scale as the 1.15 power of the population. The ratio is the ROII or return on infrastructure investment and it scales as the ratio of the two quantities and thus as the 1.3 power of population. As city size doubles the return on investment is close to an extra 25%. A city a factor of 10 larger gains a full factor of 2 relative advantage in efficiency.
Geoffrey West presents the scaling laws for cities in this video
presentation for the Long Now Foundation, “Why Cities keep on growing and Corporations always die”.

Bitcoin, a global decentralized megalopolis
“The Bitcoin ecosystem is a complex interplay of various networks, each contributing to its overall functionality and growth. Feedback loops within these networks can amplify effects, leading to accelerated adoption, innovation, and, at times, challenges. Understanding these loops is essential for stakeholders, as they can influence strategic decisions, policy-making, and future developments in the Bitcoin landscape.” - ChatGPT o1 preview
Bitcoin has now reached $2 trillion dollars in wealth on the time chain and its annual increase represents an effective yield, annual value increase or GDP of over $800 billion. There are only 6 cities in the world with a larger GDP than that amount: New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seoul, Paris, and Chicago.
Bitcoin is a Meta network of 10 or more networks and networks are prone to exhibit power law behavior. For Bitcoin the power laws manifested include the wallet address count, the hashpower (difficulty), and price. Even the distribution of wallet sizes (balances) is a power law. ChatGPT 4o calls Bitcoin “a vast, interconnected, and influential digital ecosystem”
**Networks of the Bitcoin Ecosystem**
1. Bitcoin Blockchain Network
2. Mining Network
3. Lightning Network
4. User Network
5. Developer Network
6. Merchant Network
7. Exchange Network
8. Full Node Network
9. Regulatory and Legal Network
10. Service Providers Network
Bitcoin is an ecosystem consisting of a host of networks that interact with one another and have collectively propelled growth in a power law fashion.
What we have seen for 16 years now is a power law of about the sixth power of time, in accordance with Metcalfe’s law. Metcalfe’s law says network value grows with the square of adoption. For Bitcoin the measure of adoption is the wallet growth rate, and that is growing close to the third power of Bitcoin’s age. And the square of a third power adoption results in a value that grows very rapidly, close to the sixth power of age.
We have the expectation that the Bitcoin megalopolis will continue to scale, in users, and in wealth, and in this case the scaling is very steep, with the value of the decentralized city being worth nearly the 6th power of the number of participants. There are now many more ways for individuals to participate, they can hold Bitcoin directly, have it held for them on a cryptocurrency exchange or in custody at an ETF on the NYSE or other stock exchanges. They can hold shares of MicroStrategy which gives them an indirect participation in a “Bitcoin development fund” that is acquiring Bitcoin by issuing debt and equity.
We have found with a generalized least squares regression over the price history that the price equation with age can be written as:
Price ($) = 0.0074 * T^5.89 , here T is the age of Bitcoin (since the start of 2009).
This power law relation of nearly the sixth power if it persists, as it has for 16 years, leads to fair value trend prices the next decade and a half as follows (start of each year):
Year Trend Price
2025 92K
2030 454K
2035 $1.6M
2040 $4.5M
The Bitcoin megalopolis, projecting the power law scaling that has held for well over a decade, is on a path to grow in value by a factor of 5 by 2030 and a factor of 50 by 2040. To do that the number of participants only needs to grow by less than a factor of 7 and the age only needs to grow by a factor of about 2.
In this separate study, just posted on X, Giovanni Santostasi has projected the growth of Bitcoin’s wealth (not GDP) or market cap in comparison with the wealth of 15 of the world’s richest cities. From $2 trillion today it is on a path to reach the present day wealth of New York City plus London plus Tokyo plus another dozen of the world's richest cities combined, within one decade. This will be achieved with only a four times increase in the number of Bitcoiners in the megalopolis.
Figure 3. Projection of the wealth of the Bitcoin megalopolis vs. its population of Bitcoiners. It should reach the current wealth of the world’s 15 wealthiest cities combined by the mid-2030s. The red line is the cumulative wealth and population of all the 15 labelled cities, amounting to 200 million people. So by 2034 or 2035 there should be 200 million Bitcoin residents as well, and with similar wealth. Of course many of them will be residents of those physical cities’ urban areas as well. The legend “25 years to achieve the same wealth of the largest 15 cities in the world” refers to Bitcoin having an age of 25 in 2034.
HyperBitcoin, growth to equal the global money supply, could occur with just a minority of the world’s population holding Bitcoin wallets directly. More and more it will seep into retirement accounts as it becomes part of broader investment portfolios and as more companies add Bitcoin to their treasuries, already there are some 60 companies with such positions. It may find its way into government strategic reserves, as it has already begun to find its way into sovereignty wealth funds.
There are many citadels being built or yet to be acquired within the Bitcoin megalopolis. We expect the superlinear behavior, with such a steep power law for Bitcoin value, foreshadows rapid growth of its megalopolis.
What a wonderful exposition! I am saving this letter in my Bitcoin files under "Education". I love learning a new way of looking at things.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.