According to Blockworks, despite the common belief that Bitcoin is scarce due to its supply limit of 21 million BTC, the reality is different. The scarcity notion is challenged by the fact that each Bitcoin is highly divisible, up to eight decimal places, resulting in 100 million satoshis (sats) per Bitcoin. This divisibility makes Bitcoin far from scarce.
The current circulating supply of Bitcoin, which is 19.68 million, translates to 1.968 quadrillion sats. By 2140, there will be 2.1 quadrillion sats. To put this into perspective, the base money supply of the US dollar is currently less than $5.9 trillion, and the broader M3 is under $20.8 trillion. If Bitcoin is considered scarce, then so should the US dollar.
While it's true that only 21 million people can ever own one Bitcoin each, the number of Bitcoin addresses with at least one Bitcoin is slowly growing. Currently, around 1 million addresses have at least 1 BTC. However, it's not clear how many of these addresses are owned by the same person or how many exchange accounts have million-dollar Bitcoin balances.
There are also 53 million Bitcoin addresses that have one satoshi or more. If the current supply were suddenly distributed to these addresses, each would receive more than 37 million sats, equivalent to $25,500. This further challenges the notion of Bitcoin's scarcity.
The perception of scarcity is attributed to the 'fiat brain', which automatically considers the largest unit when thinking about Bitcoin as a currency. However, sats are incredibly cheap right now, priced at $0.00069 each, and are often overlooked. If every sat were worth the current price of a whole Bitcoin, an even distribution would give every human alive $16.7 billion BTC.
In light of the upcoming Bitcoin halving, there is a renewed interest in the idea of pricing Bitcoin in sats, rather than whole coins. This could potentially shift the perception of Bitcoin's scarcity and provide a more accurate representation of the cryptocurrency's supply.
