The U.S. owes $40 trillion+. Why is Bitcoin becoming more important? (Video credit: @jackmallers) The U.S. national debt just hit approximately $40.1 trillion. That number is so massive that most people can’t even comprehend it anymore. Let’s compare it to gold. Currently, gold is about $4,329 per ounce. Throughout human history, about 222,600 tons of gold have been mined. If we calculate its total value at today’s price, it’s only around $31 trillion. In other words, selling all the gold humanity has mined over thousands of years wouldn’t even be enough to cover the U.S. national debt. What’s even crazier is the amount of gold the U.S. itself holds. The U.S. government officially owns about 261.5 million ounces of gold, which at today’s market price is worth roughly $1.13 trillion—only about 2.8% of the $40.1 trillion debt. The real issue is that this machine keeps leveraging up every year. The CBO estimates that by the 2026 fiscal year, the U.S. deficit will be around $1.9 trillion. Net interest expenses have already surpassed $1 trillion, with debt interest accounting for about 3.3% of GDP. By 2036, it’s projected to rise to 4.6%. This means the U.S. will have to balance growth, tax increases, spending cuts, inflation, and real interest rates for a long time to come. As long as nominal debt grows faster than the real economy, people holding cash are bearing the other side of this system. This is why I think Bitcoin is so important. BTC is the kind of asset this world needs—one that no government can keep printing. A hard cap of 21 million coins, globally transferable, no sovereign issuer, and no promises of future repayment required. Sure, short-term high interest rates and liquidity tightening can still crush Bitcoin’s price. But over the long term, as debt within the fiat system keeps ballooning, scarce assets will increasingly act like a measuring stick. $40 trillion isn’t the reason Bitcoin *must* go up. But it’s the reason more and more people are starting to ask this question: Should we measure Bitcoin in dollars, or will there come a day when we start measuring dollars in Bitcoin?