The Wholecoiner Illusion

I was at the doctor’s office the other day getting an ingrown toenail handled. Nothing dramatic, just one of those small repairs that makes you walk ten pounds lighter afterward. My doctor had a resident shadowing her, so while we waited on the numbing to do its thing, I gave them the best life advice strangers usually ignore: Buy Bitcoin. They’d heard of it, of course, but hadn’t paid attention. Then came the standard question: How many do you have?

I smiled and said the honest thing. I don’t even have one yet. They both chuckled, like I had just admitted to liking kale. That’s when I leaned forward and delivered the line that changed the temperature in the room. “There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. There are more than 8 billion people. Do the math. Not how many people will get rich—how many people can ever end up with a whole coin?”

Even if you slice the world perfectly evenly, one coin would have to cover about 386 people. Flip the fraction the other way and you get about 0.0026 bitcoin per person. That is the absolute, theoretical, fantasyland distribution where no one loses a key, no one hoards, no governments buy, no companies stack, and Satoshi’s early stash moves like a normal wallet. In the world we actually live in, millions of coins are lost forever, large holders sit on massive positions, and institutions lock up supply for the long haul. The number of possible “wholecoiners” is not 21 million. It is something meaningfully smaller, and it shrinks as the years roll on.

Now layer in production. As of right now, miners create 3.125 BTC per block, roughly 144 blocks per day, so about 450 new bitcoin enter the world each day. That is 164,250 a year. Imagine a line outside a store with eight billion people in it, and the store only restocks 450 whole items per day. Even if those 450 went to 450 different people every single day, you would mint at most 164,250 new wholecoiners in a year. On a planet of this size, that is a rounding error. And in practice, those fresh coins do not politely funnel one per person—they get bought by whoever has the strongest conviction, the fastest reflexes, or the biggest balance sheet.

This is why “I don’t have a full coin yet” should never be a punchline. It is actually the point. A single bitcoin is not a casual unit. It is a milestone. The system was built to break that single coin into one hundred million sats for a reason. For most people, the realistic path is not owning one coin—it is owning enough sats that future you nods back in approval. If you are waiting to participate until you can scoop a whole coin, you are letting a mental model lock you out of the market.

There is another angle here that gets lost. Availability is not the same thing as supply. The hard cap is 21 million, but the actual float that you can buy today is the coins that are both movable and for sale. That float contracts in bull cycles as holders see the future and step away from the sell button. It contracts as long-term holders age into conviction. It contracts every time a government, a public company, or a fund decides to hold for a decade. The cap is physics. The float is reality. If you are trying to plan your life by watching the short-term movements, good luck. If you are trying to build on the unchanging fundamentals, welcome to Bitcoin.

So back to the resident’s question: How many do you have? The better question is how many sats are you consistently acquiring and securing. If the answer is zero, you are competing against a world that is waking up to the difference between inflationary assets and absolute scarcity. If the answer is “I’m stacking what I can, when I can,” you have already moved into the small minority who understand that scarcity is not a meme—it is a math problem.

This is also why the “production versus population” frame hits so hard. New issuance will never catch up with human demand if Bitcoin keeps doing what it does. The daily faucet is a trickle. The halving schedule keeps tightening the valve. Meanwhile the world keeps adding people, phones, exchanges, on-ramps, and reasons to opt out. If you think that mismatch resolves in favor of the person who waits, you are betting that a scarce asset with rising adoption will somehow become easier to get later. That is not how finite systems behave.

I left that exam room satisfied. They didn’t laugh again. They just stared for a moment, like I’d pulled back the curtain on something they had never thought about. There are 21 million coins. There are billions of people. Most will never own a whole one. A lot of them will never own any. The game is not about flexing unit count—it is about understanding the distribution, the schedule, and your place in line. You do not need to own the entire pie to benefit from a slice. You just need to make sure you get yours.

So here is the line I’ll keep using: There will only ever be 21 million. One coin for every 386 people if the universe were perfectly fair. It isn’t. I do not have a whole coin yet because almost no one will. I have sats because I understand what is scarce. Then I tell them the same thing I told those doctors: Buy Bitcoin. Not because it is fashionable, but because the supply math is relentless.