There’s another major milestone on the horizon for Bitcoin’s value against the U.S. dollar and it’s not $10,000… it’s $1,000,000. That may seem absurd to the financial mainstream who continues to insist there’s a bubble in the price of Bitcoin. But the flaw of their logic lies in their taxonomic classification of Bitcoin. Is it a technology? Is it a commodity? Is it a currency? Is it a security? The answer is, yes, well, sort of, and at the same time a resounding, no.

Bitcoin is an entirely new species, and the catalyst for a long overdue transformation in financial services. It’s the front runner in the evolution of money, a disruption to conventional banking, payment systems, national clearing systems, foreign exchange markets, and even central banking. But we know all that already....

This is not bubble behavior, it’s systemic evolution. We are not witnessing a bubble in BTC’s price, but confirmation of increasing acceptance of the Bitcoin network itself, and others like it, as a legitimate, fully autonomous, global, real time gross settlement system.

Bitcoin’s rise in popularity signaled that the all too familiar pattern of Internet-induced industrial disruption, like that still besetting retail, has finally reached banking… for real. But nearly a decade since it all started, many in the financial sector continue to struggle with the taxonomic rank of Bitcoin, calling it an investment instrument like a stock (now allegedly in bubble status), or a currency, or an “extremely optimistic new technology”.

Classification of Bitcoin and other crypto-assets is going to be an important job for regulators and lawmakers to get right in the long term. Far more interesting in the near term are the circumstances surrounding Bitcoin’s price rise, which might look suspiciously like a bubble... but it's not. The price surge is actually a genetic marker in the DNA of this pioneer species, pointing to a new genus of financial instruments destined to move rapidly up the food chain, i.e., digital assets issued on accessible and interoperable transactional networks.

Yeah, yeah, I know, digital assets have been around a long time. But they are not easily exchanged on publicly accessible networks— that’s the problem. Bitcoin supports only one asset on its network (BTC), making it easy to observe that the utility of the network actually increases as the value of its asset rises. For other public blockchain networks that support multiple assets, this effect may be compounded; only time will tell. This is not bubble behavior, it’s systemic evolution. We are not witnessing a bubble in BTC’s price, but confirmation of increasing acceptance of the Bitcoin network itself, and others like it, as a legitimate, fully autonomous, global, real time gross settlement system.

BTC’s price is a product of the network’s growing popularity, but not in a traditional supply and demand sense. As of today the total money supply of BTC is approximately $138 billion. While this might sound like a lot, it’s actually chump change on the global payments stage. By comparison, The Clearing House (theclearinghouse.org), which manages the largest U.S. dollar clearing system, moves about $1.5 trillion per day. That’s greater than 10 times the total value of the entire Bitcoin market in a single day, and that’s just one legacy network, and one currency. So for Bitcoin to be useful in any meaningful commercial capacity, its total money supply (or what is inexactly called “market capitalization”) will need to increase by several orders of magnitude... and that is exactly what we are witnessing.

The speed at which BTC’s price rises should not be of concern to users of the Bitcoin network, as though there were some terrible inflation risk mounting. Just the opposite. It should be encouraged and celebrated, because the network itself becomes significantly more useful and viable as the price continues to rise.

At the point where BTC reaches $1,000,000, the Satoshi, which is the smallest denomination of Bitcoin (one hundred millionth of a BTC), will be on price parity with the U.S. penny. Nothing more than a psychological threshold, but significant nonetheless. At that level, the total authorized money supply of Bitcoin will be equal to $21 Trillion USD. Then, even Jamie Dimon will become a believer, because the utility and usefulness of the Bitcoin network as a global financial utility will be impossible to dismiss.

Along the way, new and more powerful transactional networks have already begun to emerge—more species in the new genus of digital asset networks. They won’t replace Bitcoin, but will interoperate with it, creating a new global financial fabric of sorts. Ethereum is one prominent example that’s on recent rampage, and it’s no secret that I’ve also become a recent fan of Stellar.org and the Stellar network as a next up-and-comer, especially for the still-emergent multi-billion dollar ICO industry.

So when is the best time to get into BTC? Well, I’m buying (and holding) into the dips of what is still a pretty volatile market. Just be smart. Welcome to the revolution.