🚨 JUST IN: CZ just highlighted something about Bitcoin that often gets overlooked.
Bitcoin has a hard limit of 21 million coins. More than 20 million $BTC have already been mined, meaning there isn’t much new supply left to enter the market.
But CZ’s bigger point is about the Bitcoin that may already be gone forever.
He estimates that roughly 10–20% of mined BTC could be lost, stuck, or permanently unrecoverable because of forgotten passwords, lost private keys, destroyed devices, or wallets that can no longer be accessed.
That means the amount of Bitcoin actually available to buy, sell, and hold could be much smaller than the headline supply suggests.
And Bitcoin’s issuance keeps slowing.
Every halving reduces the amount of new BTC miners receive. Meanwhile, lost Bitcoin doesn’t magically come back into circulation.
So you have a fixed maximum supply, slower creation of new coins, and potentially millions of BTC that may never move again.
That’s why CZ describes Bitcoin as a “deflationary asset.”
Now imagine what happens if global demand keeps growing while the amount of Bitcoin realistically available stays tight.
More buyers chasing fewer available coins.
That supply story is one of the biggest reasons Bitcoin remains unlike almost anything the financial world has seen before.
Bitcoin has a hard limit of 21 million coins. More than 20 million $BTC have already been mined, meaning there isn’t much new supply left to enter the market.
But CZ’s bigger point is about the Bitcoin that may already be gone forever.
He estimates that roughly 10–20% of mined BTC could be lost, stuck, or permanently unrecoverable because of forgotten passwords, lost private keys, destroyed devices, or wallets that can no longer be accessed.
That means the amount of Bitcoin actually available to buy, sell, and hold could be much smaller than the headline supply suggests.
And Bitcoin’s issuance keeps slowing.
Every halving reduces the amount of new BTC miners receive. Meanwhile, lost Bitcoin doesn’t magically come back into circulation.
So you have a fixed maximum supply, slower creation of new coins, and potentially millions of BTC that may never move again.
That’s why CZ describes Bitcoin as a “deflationary asset.”
Now imagine what happens if global demand keeps growing while the amount of Bitcoin realistically available stays tight.
More buyers chasing fewer available coins.
That supply story is one of the biggest reasons Bitcoin remains unlike almost anything the financial world has seen before.