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A supply curve fixed in 2009
Almost everything about bitcoin’s future is uncertain except one thing: how many there will be. The issuance schedule was written into the first version of the software and has run without a single deviation since. It is the only money in history whose supply at any future date can be calculated to the last unit by anyone with a pocket calculator.
The rule is simple. Each block creates new coins. The amount started at 50 and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, which takes about four years. Halve something often enough and it reaches zero: the reward drops below one satoshi after the 33rd era, around the year 2140, and issuance stops at 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin.
| Event | Date | Block | Reward after | Share issued by then |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | 3 Jan 2009 | 0 | 50 BTC | 0% |
| First halving | 28 Nov 2012 | 210,000 | 25 BTC | 50% |
| Second halving | 9 Jul 2016 | 420,000 | 12.5 BTC | 75% |
| Third halving | 11 May 2020 | 630,000 | 6.25 BTC | 87.5% |
| Fourth halving | 20 Apr 2024 (UTC) | 840,000 | 3.125 BTC | 93.75% |
| Fifth halving | Expected 2028, around April | 1,050,000 | 1.5625 BTC | 96.875% |
| Sixth halving | Expected around 2032 | 1,260,000 | 0.78125 BTC | 98.4% |
| Last new coins | Around 2140 | 6,930,000 | 0 | 100% |
Live countdown: … to the next halving (…). The 20 millionth bitcoin was mined around 9 March 2026, at block 940,000.
Why 21 million?
Satoshi never gave a grand reason. The number falls out of the parameters: 50 coins, halving every 210,000 blocks, sums to just under 21 million. In an email he described the choice as an educated guess, aiming for prices that would be convenient if bitcoin caught on. The specific figure matters much less than the fact that there is one, and that changing it would need the agreement of the very people it would dilute.
Is a fixed supply a good idea? This is where bitcoin parts company with mainstream economics.
Money should be hard to make
Every currency managed by people has eventually been debased, because the temptation to create more is irresistible. A supply that no one controls protects savers from inflation and removes money from politics. Falling prices in a growing economy are a feature: they reward saving and reflect real gains in productivity.
Money should be elastic
An economy needs its money supply to grow with it and to expand in a crisis. A rigid supply means that when people rush to hold money, prices and wages must fall instead, which is slow and painful; this is the standard explanation of why the gold standard deepened the Great Depression. A currency that is expected to rise in value also discourages spending and makes debts heavier.
Both camps are arguing about a world in which bitcoin is the main unit of account. It is not, and may never be. In practice people hold it alongside elastic national currencies, which is a different proposition.
The store-of-value thesis
The whitepaper’s title calls bitcoin electronic cash. The argument most holders make today is different: that bitcoin is a store of value, a digital version of gold, and that being good cash can come later or happen on other layers.
The case runs like this. Good stores of value are scarce, durable, portable, divisible, easy to verify and hard to confiscate. Gold scores well on the first two and poorly on the rest: it is heavy, awkward to divide, costly to assay and easy to seize at a border. Bitcoin is as scarce as gold by design, weighs nothing, divides to eight decimal places, can be verified by a phone and can be carried across a border in your head. If it captured even a fraction of the role gold plays in the world’s savings, the argument goes, each coin would be worth far more than today.
The counter-case is just as easy to state. Gold has been valued for five thousand years; bitcoin for seventeen. Gold has uses in jewellery and industry that put a floor under it; bitcoin’s value rests entirely on other people continuing to want it. A store of value that can halve in a few months does not store value very reliably. And scarcity alone proves nothing: anyone can launch a coin with a fixed supply, and thousands have.
What has changed since 2020 is who takes the thesis seriously. Paul Tudor Jones, BlackRock, Fidelity and a line of corporate treasurers have all adopted some form of it. Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and most academic economists have not. Both lists are in the directory.
Stock-to-flow and its critics
Commodity analysts measure scarcity with a ratio: the existing stockpile divided by annual new production. Gold’s is about 60, meaning it would take roughly 60 years of mining to double the stock. Bitcoin’s doubles at each halving, and since April 2024 has been around 120, higher than gold’s for the first time.
In 2019 a pseudonymous analyst called PlanB turned this into a price model. He plotted bitcoin’s market value against its stock-to-flow ratio, found a remarkably tight historical fit, and extrapolated. The chart spread everywhere. It implied six-figure prices by 2021 and seven-figure prices later.
The criticisms came quickly and have aged well:
- Supply is known in advance. If the halving schedule alone determined price, the market could price it in years ahead. A model in which demand does not appear cannot be complete.
- The fit was partly an illusion. Both series simply trend upward over time. Statisticians showed that the relationship did not survive more careful tests.
- It cannot be right for ever. The ratio doubles every four years without limit. The model therefore implies a price heading to infinity.
- It missed. The model’s targets for the 2021 cycle were not reached, and the gap has widened since.
The fair summary: bitcoin’s declining issuance is real and probably matters at the margin. The idea that it mechanically sets the price does not hold up. This site makes no price predictions and you should be wary of anyone who does.
Volatility
Bitcoin’s price has gone from a fraction of a cent to six figures. It did not get there smoothly.
| Peak | Approximate peak price | Fall to the following low | Time to a new record |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2011 | about $30 | about 93% | about 20 months |
| December 2013 | about $1,150 | about 85% | about 38 months |
| December 2017 | just under $20,000 | about 84% | about 36 months |
| November 2021 | about $69,000 | about 77% | about 28 months |
| October 2025 | about $126,000 | about 54% to the June 2026 low | Not yet recovered as of October 2026 |
Historical figures, rounded. Drawdowns and recovery times for 2013, 2017 and 2021 as summarised by Yahoo Finance, 5 October 2026. Past patterns say nothing certain about the future, and the most recent decline may not be over.
Why so wild? The supply cannot respond to price, so every shift in demand lands entirely on price. There is no agreed way to value it, so sentiment does a lot of the work. The market never closes. And a great deal of trading is done with borrowed money: when prices fall, leveraged positions are forcibly sold, pushing prices down further. On 10 October 2025, four days after the record high, more than $19 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated in a single day, the largest such event recorded.
Volatility has declined gradually as the market has grown, and each bust has been shallower than the last in percentage terms. It remains several times more volatile than shares or gold. Anyone holding bitcoin should expect, as a matter of historical routine, to see it lose half its value at some point.
Is it a hedge or a risk asset?
Supporters describe bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and financial turmoil. The record is mixed. Over its whole life it has vastly outpaced inflation. But in the inflation shock of 2022 it fell by three-quarters as interest rates rose. In early 2026 it sold off alongside technology shares when hedge funds facing losses elsewhere dumped their most liquid holdings. And in 2025 gold rose by more than half while bitcoin ended the year below where it began.
The evidence so far suggests that over short periods bitcoin trades like a high-risk technology asset, sensitive to interest rates and to the general appetite for speculation, while over long periods it has behaved like something else. Whether the long-term pattern continues is exactly what holders and sceptics disagree about.
Bitcoin versus gold
| Gold | Bitcoin | |
|---|---|---|
| Track record | About 5,000 years | Since 2009 |
| Total stock | About 222,600 tonnes above ground, worth about $29 trillion (World Gold Council, mid-2026) | About 20.1 million BTC, worth (live value unavailable) |
| New supply each year | Roughly 1.6% (about 3,600 tonnes mined) | About 0.8%, halving in 2028 |
| Ultimate supply | Unknown; rises if the price makes more deposits worth mining | Capped just under 21 million |
| Held by central banks | About 39,000 tonnes, 18% of the stock | A few governments, mostly from seizures |
| Other uses | Jewellery (about 45% of the stock), electronics, dentistry | None beyond the network itself |
| Moving it | Slow, heavy, costly, easy to intercept | Anywhere in minutes |
| Verifying it | Needs assay equipment | Any node, instantly |
| Volatility | Moderate | Very high |
| Income | None | None |
The comparison flatters bitcoin on supply and gold on everything to do with time. A reasonable person can look at this table and conclude that bitcoin is a better gold, or that it is a volatile imitation of an asset that needs no improving. Many investors who are persuaded by the scarcity argument simply hold some of each.
What if you had stacked?
“Stacking sats” is slang for buying small amounts of bitcoin regularly, whatever the price. Formally it is dollar-cost averaging. It does not improve returns by magic. What it does is remove the decision of when to buy, which in a market this volatile is the decision people most often get wrong.
Is it money yet?
Economists traditionally ask three things of money.
- Store of value. Over long periods, spectacularly. Over short ones, unreliably. This is the role bitcoin plays for most holders.
- Medium of exchange. Technically capable, especially with Lightning, and used for cross-border transfers and by people shut out of banking. But most holders prefer not to spend an asset they expect to rise, and in most countries every purchase is a taxable event. El Salvador’s legal-tender experiment showed that making bitcoin official does not make people use it.
- Unit of account. Hardly at all. Almost nothing is priced in bitcoin, including bitcoin mining machines.
So bitcoin today is best described as a monetary asset rather than a currency: something people save in, occasionally pay with, and measure in dollars. Its advocates see that as stage two of a longer journey. Its critics see it as where the journey ends. The next page gathers the strongest versions of the case against.