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 earliest documented appearance in cryptocurrency discussion is from October 5, 2017, in a SomethingAwful forum thread, by a user posting under the handle Blade Runner. The post was sarcastic — Blade Runner was a bitcoin skeptic, the SomethingAwful crypto threads were a Goon-coded venue for laughing at the asset, and the phrase as it first appeared was a parody of how the speaker imagined a bitcoin enthusiast thinking. The first canonical-grammar Twitter usage — number go up, no article, in the present-tense bitcoin-coded sense — was David Gerard’s tweet on December 9, 2017. Gerard was, and remains, a bitcoin critic. The bitcoin community adopted both the phrase and its skeptical origin without apparent embarrassment, which is the first thing that makes the artifact unusual.
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, beside the point. 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. The most lasting extension is Pierre Rochard’s NgU technology — number-go-up technology — coined in a tweet on May 7, 2020, in which Rochard described bitcoin as “the world’s most advanced NgU technology.” The reframing is the joke. The phrase pretended to elevate number go up to the status of an engineered feature, which both was and was not what bitcoin’s defenders had been arguing for over a decade. 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 PlanB’s stock-to-flow argument; it is functionally the same argument with the academic apparatus removed.
The journalist Zeke Faux published a 2023 book titled Number Go Up about cryptocurrency’s broader excesses; the bitcoin community has largely ignored the borrowing, on the grounds that number go up belonged to bitcoin first and that Faux’s book was about something else. Whether the borrowing was earned is a question the catalog declines to settle. What it records is that number go up originated outside the bitcoin community, in a venue that was making fun of bitcoin, and was adopted by the bitcoin community to describe itself. The unsanitized origin is the point. Number go up is what bitcoiners say to acknowledge that they have absorbed their critics’ best line and decided to use it themselves.