Number go up is a phrase, a meme, a chart annotation, a half-ironic worldview, and a four-word reduction of bitcoin’s central value proposition to its most cynical possible articulation. Its origins are diffuse. It appears in fragmentary forms on Bitcoin Twitter from at least early 2018, in the wake of bitcoin’s first full-mainstream cycle peak and the long bear market that followed. It crystallized into its canonical four-word form, abbreviated NgU, sometime in mid-2019, by which point it had become a recognizable shorthand. By 2020, it was sufficiently established that journalist Zeke Faux would later use it as the title of his 2023 book about cryptocurrency’s broader excesses, an attribution that the bitcoin community has largely ignored on the grounds that number go up belonged to bitcoin first and that Faux’s book was about something else.
The phrase’s grammar is deliberately broken. Number go up is not how a fluent English speaker describes a price increase. It is the sentence a small child or a low-effort artificial intelligence would produce if asked to summarize what bitcoin does. The grammatical degradation is the joke. The phrase compresses, into the smallest possible number of words and the lowest possible level of analytical sophistication, the entire case for bitcoin: that the asset’s price has, on a sufficiently long time horizon, gone up; that this is the asset’s most reliable property; and that any further explanation of why the asset has gone up is, for the typical holder’s purposes, supererogatory. Number go up is, in its bitcoin community usage, both a confession of what most holders actually care about and a deflection of every more sophisticated framing of what bitcoin is.
The phrase’s cultural utility is that it permits the bitcoin community to acknowledge, with a kind of self-aware humor, what its critics have long alleged: that the case for bitcoin is, at the most reductive level, a Greater Fool argument dressed up in libertarian theory and Austrian economics. The community’s response has not been to deny this. The response has been to embrace the reduction, to apply it sarcastically to itself, and to argue that the number going up is, in fact, a coherent investment thesis when the asset has a fixed supply, a global addressable market, and a sixteen-year track record of upward bias. The phrase, in this usage, is not an admission. It is a defiance. Number go up says: yes, that’s exactly what we’re betting on, and we are not embarrassed about it, and the chart, over a sufficiently long time horizon, has been on our side.
The phrase has spawned an extended family of variants. Number go down describes bear markets. Number go sideways describes accumulation phases. Number go up technology — abbreviated NgU technology — refers to bitcoin itself, characterized as a machine whose primary function is the production of upward price movement. NgU theory is the half-ironic name for the proposition that bitcoin’s price will continue to rise over the long run because of its supply schedule, its growing adoption, and the ongoing debasement of competing fiat currencies. The theory is structurally similar to Saifedean Ammous’s stock-to-flow argument; it is functionally the same argument with the academic apparatus removed.
What number go up has accomplished, distinct from its specific propositional content, is that it has given the bitcoin community a way of laughing at itself in language that does not concede the underlying argument. The phrase is simultaneously self-deprecating and triumphalist, ironic and earnest, an admission and a boast. The bitcoin community contains many holders who would describe their thesis with sophisticated reference to monetary economics, network effects, and protocol design. The same community contains many holders who would describe their thesis as number go up. These are, in many cases, the same person on different days. The phrase exists to make the second day acceptable.