It’s not a malicious criticism. It’s confusion. And it’s understandable.

Those now in their sixties grew up in a world where work had clear rhythms and visible signals. The phone rang and you picked it up. A task took time, but it had a beginning and an end. Being busy was tangible. Presence was proof of commitment.

From that perspective, the question makes sense: how can it be that today—when technology saves us from tasks that once consumed hours—people still say they have no time?

The answer, I believe, is not a loss of values, but a deeper transformation: we don’t have less time; we have far higher expectations.

Contrary to the pessimistic intuition that dominates so many conversations, the world is not worse. In many essential ways, it is better. We live longer than ever before. Infant mortality has fallen dramatically. Extreme poverty declined sharply over recent decades, with the obvious exception of the shock caused by COVID. These are not opinions. They are facts.

That doesn’t mean everything is solved. Inequality remains a massive, unresolved debt. Wealth is concentrated in extreme ways, and the benefits of growth are far from evenly distributed. But acknowledging that debt does not require denying progress. On the contrary—it requires understanding it clearly.

Something similar happens with work and productivity.

It’s true that, at an aggregate level, productivity growth has slowed in many economies. But that macro view doesn’t fully capture daily reality. At the individual level, a person today can coordinate more projects, process more information, make more decisions, and generate more impact per hour than thirty years ago.

Technology didn’t give us leisure. It gave us capacity. And that capacity was immediately absorbed by new demands.

The time once saved by sending a letter was reinvested in sending multiple messages. Meetings that once filled an entire morning are now fragmented into calls, voice notes, shared documents, and constant follow-ups. The day didn’t empty—it became layered.

That’s why someone can take time to reply to a message and still be deeply committed to their work. It’s not disinterest. It’s saturation. It’s not irresponsibility. It’s asynchronicity. In an environment where everything interrupts, prioritization becomes a necessity, not a sign of disrespect.

The generation now watching this with concern was formed in a world of scarce interruptions. The current generation lives inside a permanent stream of stimuli. Measuring commitment using the rules of the previous world leads to the wrong conclusion.

Perhaps the mistake is not moral, but interpretative.

A phone that goes unanswered no longer means what it once did. A delayed reply does not signal a lack of vocation. Very often, it signals the opposite: an attempt to protect focus in a world that constantly attacks it.

The world faces enormous challenges. Inequality, anxiety, uncertainty. But it is also true that never before have so many people lived so long, with so many tools and possibilities at their disposal.

Perhaps we are not facing a lost generation.

Perhaps we are facing a world that changed faster than our criteria for judging it.

And understanding that doesn’t mean giving up.

It means updating the lens.

Let’s be honest: Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision—bitcoin as a universal, decentralized means of payment without banks or intermediaries—is still far from being fulfilled. Yes, bitcoin can be used for payments. Yes, the technology exists and some people use it. But the promise of becoming the world’s financial system remains unrealized. Even today, most people don’t pay for their coffee or their rent in bitcoin.

Yet while that facet continues to simmer slowly, bitcoin’s other great thesis has taken hold with force: the idea of being the “new digital gold.” A store of value that first seduced retail users, enthusiasts, and libertarians, and that in the last year has become a magnet for institutional capital. The approval of spot ETFs in the United States (essentially a regulated, stock market

-traded way to own bitcoin) marked a clear turning point: it’s no longer just crypto-evangelist technologists. Now we’re talking about pension funds, banks, and corporations allocating part of their strategic reserves to bitcoin. Even central banks are beginning to think about diversifying their reserves with crypto assets. Not just El Salvador—this year the United States created its own strategic crypto reserve, and dozens of other sovereign states are following the same path. It’s a qualitative shift that’s hard to reverse.

This market maturation is giving bitcoin its own internal dynamics. Of course, it remains correlated with other risk assets: it rises with global investor appetite, suffers with interest-rate hikes or geopolitical tensions. But increasingly, its price is being driven by internal factors. There’s a “bull” narrative (market jargon for optimism about price) under construction: programmed scarcity as an anchor of value, the competition among large funds to accumulate a finite asset. It’s a market that is slowly emancipating itself from the macro tide, finding its own rhythm.

And all this is happening with adoption still relatively limited. In Argentina, one of the countries with the highest crypto penetration in the world (driven by our own macroeconomic turmoil), less than 20% of the population owns crypto assets. What would happen if everyone did? What would happen if adoption moved from niche to mass-market?

The future is uncertain, but we can try a provocative exercise. Today, the estimated global net worth is around $500 trillion (that’s 500,000,000,000,000—14 zeros). The total number of bitcoins that will ever exist is capped at 21 million, but it’s estimated that at least 5 or 6 million are lost forever: forgotten keys, wallets from early users that are unrecoverable. That leaves about 15 million bitcoins truly in circulation.

Let’s do the math: if all the world’s wealth were expressed in bitcoin (an extreme hypothesis, obviously, but useful to establish a theoretical ceiling), each bitcoin would be worth over $33 million. Of course, no one believes 100% of global wealth will move into bitcoin. Not even the most fervent maximalists. But let’s think about more reasonable scenarios. If just 10% of global wealth sought refuge in bitcoin, we’d be looking at a price of $3.3 million per coin. Even with a modest 1% (a figure roughly in line with allocation recommendations some traditional financial advisors are starting to make), we’d be talking about $330,000. Triple today’s price. And that’s without accounting for future dollar inflation, potential distortions from a global financial crisis, or the year-over-year growth in global wealth that’s expected.

Of course, this isn’t a guaranteed prediction. Bitcoin remains volatile; its price can crash as dramatically as it can surge. There are regulatory risks, technological risks, even narrative risks: the consensus that it is “digital gold” isn’t unshakeable. But it’s not a utopia to imagine million-dollar bitcoin prices. It’s the same mental exercise investors do with gold: asking what share of global capital seeks safety in it. And bitcoin has an advantage: it is programmatically finite, transparent, and global by design.

Today, we look at the $118,853 mark with awe. In a few years, we might remember it as the moment the world began to seriously consider that bitcoin wasn’t just a nerdy experiment or a speculative instrument, but a new standard of value storage. An asset that no longer needs to promise to be everyone’s money to be, at the very least, the world’s digital vault.

Perhaps that’s its most realistic destiny. Perhaps that’s even better. Because gold never bought coffee, but it did define empires. And bitcoin, in its slow but relentless march toward maturity, seems determined to write its own version of that story.

A million-dollar bitcoin isn’t a utopia. It is, quite simply, a possible future. And for many, a desirable one.

In the crypto industry, we welcome this progress with great enthusiasm: it marks the beginning of a new chapter — one that is more mature, more transparent, and more secure, both for users and companies. Most importantly, it’s a powerful first step toward a regulatory approach that supports innovation instead of working against it.

At Bitso, we’ve spent years working to make access to stablecoins in Latin America simple, regulated, and secure. That’s why we see this moment as both validation and encouragement for what we’ve been advocating all along: stablecoins are essential tools to help people protect the value of their money in unstable economies, and they deserve clear rules that support responsible adoption.

In our region, where inflation, currency volatility, and restrictions on access to strong currencies are part of daily life, crypto dollars have gone from being a technological curiosity to becoming a real necessity — almost a survival tool. Millions of people already use them to save, send remittances, pay for services, or simply preserve the value of their income. They’re more accessible, more efficient, and don’t require carrying stacks of bills in your pocket.

The Genius Act outlines requirements such as 1:1 reserves for stablecoin issuers, regular audits, and federal oversight. These standards raise the bar for safety and trust. And while the framework applies initially to U.S.-based issuers, its effect will reach far beyond U.S. borders. In practice, it sets a precedent that many other countries — including ours — are likely to follow. Trust is contagious, and when a stablecoin complies with strict rules in the U.S., users in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, or São Paulo are likely to feel more secure using it.

This kind of progress also opens the door for banks, companies, and governments in the region to start viewing stablecoins differently. With legal clarity, they can adopt them for cross-border payments, as tools for financial inclusion, or even as part of their reserves. Just a few years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

The Genius Act isn’t perfect, nor is it the final word. But it’s a firm step in the right direction — and a reminder that smart regulation can drive innovation. From Latin America, and especially from Argentina, where the demand for alternatives to the peso is structural, we celebrate this milestone. And we renew our commitment to ensure that stablecoins continue to grow on solid ground — with trust, transparency, and a focus on people.