Opening the market software, the screen scrolls with the same question—bottoming out or exiting? Some toss and turn over a few hundred dollars of volatility, while others study the K-line chart until dawn. But there is a cognitive gap that is easily overlooked: the so-called "bottom area" that retail investors obsess over is actually irrelevant in the eyes of true institutional investors. Their gaze has long been fixed decades ahead.

Recently, I revisited a research report from VanEck and, after multiple readings, truly understood a core difference: retail investors are playing T+0 operations on the daily chart level, while institutions are designing a multi-decade wealth growth curve. The report provides a specific forecast—under the baseline scenario, by 2050, the price of BTC could reach $2.9 million, with an annualized compound growth rate of about 15% from now.

It sounds like a fairy tale at first, but after understanding the underlying assumptions of institutions, it becomes clear that this logic is quite solid. There are two main assumptions, each gradually being validated by reality. The first is that BTC will eventually account for 5%-10% of global trade settlement volume. The second is that BTC will become a strategic reserve asset for central banks, occupying 2.5% of their balance sheets.

The idea that "central banks will buy BTC" may seem distant, but reality is already changing. Last year, the Czech Central Bank took the lead, purchasing about $1 million worth of Bitcoin to test an investment portfolio. The U.S. government also officially incorporated 200,000 BTC seized through judicial confiscation into the national strategic reserve. These series of actions indicate that BTC is gradually shifting from a purely speculative asset to a strategic reserve asset, evolving from an assumption into reality.