There’s a rumor making the rounds again—an old ghost in new clothes—that Ethereum will one day “flip” Bitcoin.

As in, ETH’s market cap will surpass BTC’s.

It even has a name: the Flippening.

Every few years, it swings back around—like Halley’s Comet, or a new reason to short the yen.

And every time, crypto Twitter picks sides.

Team Orange vs. Team Purple.

As Ethereum bulls, James and I can’t help leaning forward when this debate resurfaces. And, as you may know, Tom Lee of Fundstrat just brought it back from hibernation.

As Lee puts it, it’s a contest of architectures: who replaces more of the existing financial system, and how fast.

Here’s how Lee explains it. (And my take.)

1971: The Original Flippening

In 1971, Nixon ended the dollar’s link to gold.

With one signature, money became synthetic—no longer backed by metal, only by trust, credit, and the inertia of the system itself.

Many were convinced this would end the dollar’s reign. Prominent economist Charles Kindleberger said point-blank the currency was “finished.” (He called it “The crime of 1971,” the act by which the U.S. “deliberately torpedoed the dollar system.”)

Instead, the opposite happened: the dollar became the uncontested center of the world’s new floating-exchange-rate system.

Why? Because Wall Street stepped in.

They built an empire of products… money-market funds, mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, futures… all with a second-order effect of keeping the dollar in motion.

The result? Finance went vertical.

By the early 1980s, the dollar accounted for roughly 70 to 80 percent of global trade invoicing and most international reserves—about double its share before 1971.

The dollar, says Lee, became “fully synthetic,” which, paradoxically, expanded the dollar’s global power.

To Austrian eyes, 1971 was the day money lost its soul. (They’re not entirely wrong.)

But from that faithless experiment came a new creed: liquidity, leverage, and motion—the gospel of modern finance.

Lee’s thesis for ETH is pragmatic: history repeating itself in code.

2025: The Synthetic Era 2.0

Bitcoin is indeed the gold of this age. It’s designed for stability and scarcity, not speed or complexity.

But Ethereum is the Wall Street layer: programmable, flexible, capable of turning static value into motion.

Stablecoins are digital dollars stripped of friction. DeFi protocols are re-creating credit and derivatives, but this time with fewer middlemen. Tokenized stocks, bonds, and real estate are the next generation of financial products: born programmable, global, and instant.

“So,” says Lee, “as we move not just dollars onto the blockchain, but we'll move stocks and real estate, dollar dominance is going to be the opportunity of Ethereum.”

And, to frame the scale, it’s worth taking a closer look at the supply side.

The Math of Scarcity

Credit where it’s due: Hunter Horsley (@HHorsley) posted the following on X (thanks to Adam Sharp of Daily Reckoning fame for flagging it).

In 2024, about 3,660 tons of gold were mined, plus another 1,370 tons recycled. At current prices, that’s ~$700 billion in new gold supply—money that has to find buyers just to keep the price from falling.

Bitcoin adds 164,000 new coins a year, roughly ~$24 billion in new supply. Gold needs about thirty times more inflows just to tread water. Bitcoin can grow with a fraction of that.

While Hunter’s focus was on Bitcoin, the story is even more compelling for Ethereum.

Ethereum’s issuance turns net-negative when network activity rises, creating a deflationary trend. Because part of every transaction fee is “burned,” sustained usage gradually reduces total supply over time.

So, as time goes on, gold gets heavier, Bitcoin gets tighter, and Ethereum starts disappearing.

The Long View

So will Ethereum overtake Bitcoin? The honest answer: we don’t know.

What we do know…

The asymmetric upside in Ethereum—and the expanding lattice of protocols that surround it—is still priced like a sideshow to Bitcoin’s main act.

Bitcoin will likely keep its crown as the reserve asset of the crypto universe as the simplest, hardest, most trusted collateral.

Gold became a foundation. In the cryptoverse, that’s Bitcoin.

But the axis shifted in 1971.

Whether it tilts again on such a massive scale is always up for debate.

Though you can almost hear the faint creak of something enormous shifting its weight.