What if a mid-size nation adopts bitcoin as legal tender?
A mid-size nation adopting bitcoin as legal tender is a legitimacy/demand signal: BTC rallies with ETH/SOL beta and MSTR/COIN as levered proxies. The direct analogue is El Salvador's Sep-2021 adoption — which sold off on the day and drew IMF pushback rather than sustained inflows. Forward angle: the fiscal/IMF-financing friction is the swing factor; absent real balance-sheet accumulation, the move is sentiment that fades — size the bull case to the country's actual buying capacity.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A mid-size nation adopts bitcoin as legal tender (a larger El Salvador). The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▲ · Crypto liquidity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.