Michael Saylor on Bitcoin Scarcity: Not Enough BTC for Everyone

Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor recently made a striking statement on X concerning Bitcoin’s scarcity.

Saylor wrote in a tweet, “There isn’t enough Bitcoin for everyone,” highlighting the scarcity behind the largest cryptocurrency by market valuation.

Bitcoin’s total supply is fixed at 21 million coins, a built-in feature that differentiates it from traditional fiat currencies, which can be printed at will by central banks.

Bitcoin has a current circulating supply of 19.99 million BTC, with just 1.01 million BTC left to mine. Bearing this in mind, Saylor says there might not be enough Bitcoin to go around.

As of March 1, Strategy, under Saylor’s leadership, holds 720,737 $BTC acquired for about $54.77 billion at $75,985 per Bitcoin.

Not enough Bitcoin to go around?

Lark Davis, a crypto analyst, engaged with Saylor’s tweet on X. “Saylor said it. There isn’t enough Bitcoin for everyone. He’s right. Here’s the math that should keep you up at night.”

Davis sides with Saylor’s viewpoint that there may not be enough Bitcoin for everyone, citing Bitcoin’s total supply, which is 21 million coins.

“That’s it. That’s all there will ever be. But the real number is already much lower than that,” Lark added. According to him, around 3.7 million BTC are estimated to be lost forever, locked in wallets whose owners forgot passwords, threw away hard drives or died without leaving instructions. This excludes Satoshi’s 1.1 million coins that have never moved once in 15 years, Strategy’s more than 720,000 BTC holdings and the 328,000 BTC locked in the U.S. Strategic Reserve, which by executive order cannot be sold.

That is roughly six million Bitcoin already gone, or frozen, before the discussion of whale, institution and government accumulation comes in.

Davis estimated the amount of Bitcoin realistically available on the open market to be somewhere around 15 million coins. With roughly 60 million millionaires in the world, if every single one of them wanted just one whole Bitcoin, there still would not be enough to go around. And that is before the other eight billion people show up to the party.