Why 21 Million

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** Note: The audio files were created using pleb ai. Special thanks to Arun Nedun who was gracious enough to let me use this for free. The voice is created using the text 2 speech app on pleb.ai. ** I’m not very good at reading stuff outloud. I mumble too much, talk too fast, and don’t pause for punctuation. I wrote this with my own natural intelligence, but I assure you this AI voice sounds better than I my natural voice.

Have you ever wondered why 21 million?  I have. I never had an answer though, until now. At least I think I do. As the saying goesm “don't trust, verify.” I don't have a way to verify this, but Martti Malmi posted this note yesterday  He says it's his email correspondence with Satoshi in 2009-2011.  Malmi was the second person to work on bitcoin software, assuming Satoshi was one person. According to Malmi:
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"Satoshi - Sirius emails 2009-2011
 
This is the correspondence between myself (Martti Malmi, AKA Sirius) and Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. I did not feel comfortable sharing private correspondence earlier, but decided to do so for an important trial in the UK in 2024 where I was a witness. Also, a long time has passed now since the emails were sent. The archive is incomplete and contains only emails from my address @cc.hut.fi. My university email addresses changed to @aalto.fi in early 2011, and I don't have backups of those emails. There are some passwords and a street address mentioned in the emails, but those are no longer valid or relevant.

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In my last blog, I mentioned that e-mail kinda sucks. When I wrote that of course, I didn't know someone just made some of Satoshi's emails public. Satoshi's e-mails don't suck. They give us a glimpse into the mind of a genius.  Like I said, I have no way of verifying if this email correspondence is true. I am somewhat putting my trust in Malmi, but I assign a low probability of forgery here. If this e-mail was sent to he who shall not be named, I wouldn't trust it at all. This was not an email sent to he who shall not be named, however. It's sent from Satoshi's first volunteer and the dude who built the Iris nostr client.(It's the same dude by the way).
 
I've mentioned this before, but my favorite bitcoin quote is by Knut Svanholm. “Absolute mathematical scarcity achieved by consensus in a sufficiently decentralized, distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention. It cannot be achieved again by a network made up of participants aware of this discovery since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability  itself.”
Why 21 million?  Why is that the magic number?  What was Satoshi's inspiration for limiting the total supply to 21 million? Why not 100 million or 1 million?  If we believe this email to be true, Satoshi gave an answer.

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There we have it. The answer to why Satoshi chose 21 million. It was an educated guess. It was a difficult choice. We are stuck with the network. The only question now is will it be used for a fraction of world commerce, or a large portion of world commerce?

On the latest episode of TFTC , Mežinskis says bitcoin actually does about twice the amount of transactions that FedWire does. My man, NunyaBidness posted the actual numbers on this note. 
Bitcoin only has a 1 trillion dollar market cap however. Bitcoin's final settlement layer is already about twice as much as the Federal Reserve's settlement layer. In other words, the bitcoin peer 2 peer transaction electronic cash system is already more efficient than the Federal Reserve system. We also know that a small fraction of the world is using bitcoin, but it’s still worth about a trillion dollars. We also know the new inventory of this tool which is X more efficient than the Federal reserve is dropping by 50% in a couple of months. We tend to focus on the BTC/fiat price, but the price is not important. The value is more important. I think bitcoin is undervalued because it is not understood by most people.

In a world slipping into chaos more and more, bitcoin is a financial system that is more robust than the world’s reserve currency. That’s the bullish case for bitcoin. Obama called it a Swiss Bank in your pocket in 2015. I think he did this to ridicule it’s privacy, but bitcoin is like Switzerland of cyberspace. 21 million might have been an arbitrary number, but the mathematical scarcity cannot be broken even by world war. Bitcoin is a neutral place to store your wealth that cannot be debased by foreign or domestic government. I suspect, at some point in the future, that will be useful for a large fraction of world commerce. If history rhymes like Mark Twain says, we can expect governments, terrorist groups, the mafia, or whoever will make it useful for a larger fraction of world commerce. That’s the true price of bitcoin: 21Million/A Large Portion Of World Commerce.

Is it enough?
I hope so.