Top 3 Facts Newbies Don't Know About Bitcoin

I spent 8 months working at a street level client services center for a digital asset platform in Hong Kong.

Hundreds of people walked through, asking questions about Bitcoin (BTC). I talked to almost all of them in person, face-to-face. What surprised me most was how many people just didn’t know these basic facts about Bitcoin!

• you can buy a fraction of BTC

• there is a limited supply of BTC

• about every 4 years the NEW supply of BTC is cut in half

Let’s break this down.

Unit bias is the concept that buyers are more enticed to buy a whole ​unit​ of a given asset instead of a fractional quantity. Many people think they need to buy a whole bitcoin. They don’t know that the smallest unit of bitcoin is not 1 BTC but it’s 1 satoshi (“sat” for short).

We know:

100 cents = 1 dollar

We can similarly say:

100,000,000 sats = 1 BTC

Buying 0.00034500 BTC seems like a pointless amount because of unit bias. To rid yourself of the unit bias, simply focus on the smaller unit. The smaller unit is the satoshi.

0.00034500 BTC = 34,500 satoshi (sats)

Denominating it as buying 34,500 sats is much more enticing, even though this is the exact same amount of bitcoin. First aspire to become a sat millionaire (0.01 BTC) and then set your goals on someday accumulating enough sats to hold a whole bitcoin.

There’s no need to view your holdings in tiny fractions of BTC. Just stack sats!

The maximum number of bitcoin that can be issued—mined—is 21 million. Ever.

As of today, 19.27 BTC have been mined and in cirrculation. That means there are currently only 1.73 million left to be mined over the next 117 years.

You can always keep track of this on CoinMarketCap.

The final bitcoin is not expected to be generated until the year 2140.

By design and written into the core code, the number of bitcoins minted per block is reduced by 50% after every 210,000 blocks, or about once every four years.

So there will be even less to go around.

The limited supply of bitcoin is like a fancy restaurant with a fixed number of tables. No matter how many people want to eat there, there's only so much space to go around. And just like how some people might be willing to pay extra for a table at that fancy restaurant, some people are willing to pay extra for a piece of the limited bitcoin pie. But just like how the restaurant can't magically create more tables, there's only a set number of bitcoins that can ever exist.

So if you're one of the lucky few who gets a seat at the table, savor that bitcoin like it's a five-star meal! Or a rare collector handbag!