In the first-ever Satoshi Nakamoto Annual Address, Thomas Eichenberger outlined how Bitcoin has moved from collectible to store of value – already functioning as money – and how banks are now building services on top of it step by step.
The inaugural bitcoin annual address is an initiative by Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway and drew a full house at the National Library in Oslo on Wednesday evening – the day before the central bank governor’s annual speech. This year’s speaker was Thomas Eichenberger from the Swiss bank Sygnum Bank
Eichenberger opened by going back to the 2008 whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and computer science's dual-use problem. Instead of relying on a central ledger, he described how Bitcoin allows a distributed network of nodes to agree on who owns what, and in what order transactions occur. For the first time, digital money could exist without a trusted third party coordinating balances.
He described Bitcoin not as “yet another asset” but as a new monetary architecture. Peer-to-peer means final settlement directly between participants, without intermediaries and without a common central counterparty. Electronic means digital from scratch, with security rooted in cryptographic signatures and a time-stamped blockchain, not in promises from banks or states. As a cash system, the goal is value transfer without bank dependence, in which verification, history and settlement are moved out to the network itself.
Furthermore, Eichenberger posed the question: Before discussing whether Bitcoin is money, we essentially agree on what money is. Drawing on classical economists and recent analyses, he described a set of monetary properties: scarcity, durability, acceptability, portability, divisibility, and fungibility, with immutability and decentralization as modern additions. Scarcity is about limited supply relative to other goods, durability about the money form withstanding repeated use, acceptance about how broadly it is received in the economy.
Portability describes how easily value can be moved over distances, divisibility if it can be broken down into smaller units without losing function, and fungibility whether each unit is interchangeable with another. Immutability and decentralized storage point to systems where history is difficult to manipulate and no single institution controls issuance and custody. Measured against this matrix, Eichenberger portrayed Bitcoin as structurally strong on most points: a hard ceiling of 21 million bitcoin, high portability across borders, digital divisibility down to one satoshi, and a ledger that is append-only and secured through proof-of-work. The open variable is acceptance, which is not decided by protocol but by actual usage, regulation and market behavior.
To put this into historical frame, he placed Bitcoin in a typical evolution for monetary goods: first collectible, then store of value, then means of payment, and finally unit of account. Such shifts happen gradually, with old and new systems side by side, and without a single point at which “everything” changes. The question in the hall was therefore not whether Bitcoin is already a monetary phenomenon, but in what phase of this evolution we find ourselves.
As Eichenberger sees it, Bitcoin has moved out of the pure collectible phase and established itself as a store of value for a growing group of users and institutions. The path on to means of payment requires more than ideological conviction: volatility must down, markets must deepen, and payment layers such as Lightning must deliver fast and affordable transaction capacity. At the same time, regulatory clarity is needed for use in payments, and tax systems that don't turn every cup of coffee into a taxable event. Becoming a unit of account will require even more structural changes, such as pricing raw materials and commodities in bitcoin, use as an international settlement currency and place in national reserve and portfolio strategies.
A central part of the talk was about how banks actually take in Bitcoin in practice. The point was that institutional adoption is not one dramatic moment, but a layered infrastructure story. Banks don't go straight to bitcoin-denominated balance sheets; they move through distinct paces that build on each other.
First comes custody, in which banks offer secure storage of customers' bitcoin and establish basic operational and regulatory frameworks. Once this is in place, broker functions, which allow clients to buy and sell via known banking surfaces, follow with known KYC and compliance regime. With both custody and liquidity established, lending products arise where bitcoin is used as collateral, and the bank can begin to price risk and capital use around digital assets.
From there, banks can start facilitating on-chain transfers and integrating the Bitcoin network into payment and treasury runs, for example, using it as an additional settlement and transfer layer. Finally, when the foundation is robust, more advanced yield and structured products can be built on top, with Bitcoin included in combination with other assets and derivatives. This is how Bitcoin moves from being a speculative appendage off its balance sheet, to becoming part of the banking stack itself.
In closing, Eichenberger raised his gaze to the future: If Bitcoin has already made the leap from collectible to store of value, what does it take to move forward. To fill the role of a means of payment, he pointed to the need for lower volatility, deeper liquidity in the markets, functioning layer-2 solutions such as Lightning and more predictable frameworks for payments and taxes. Only when transactions can be conducted efficiently and without disproportionate legal friction does it make sense for more people to use Bitcoin in the everyday economy.
To become a unit of account, the world needs further. Contracts, commodities and international trade agreements would have to be priced in bitcoin to a greater extent, and the network could act as neutral settlement currency between institutions and state blocs. In a more multipolar world, he outlined a picture of the future in which Bitcoin acts as a neutral monetary common denominator that does not belong to one central bank or one geopolitical sphere. The evening was rounded off with Satoshi's oft-quoted formulation — “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on” — and an open question for the audience: are we facing a financialization of Bitcoin, or a Bitcoinization of finance. Either way, was the message, the discussion is no longer peripheral. It's monetary, and it's about how we organise money and finance going forward.
