Bitcoin has been around for 18 years and it still isn't money, but now almost all of it has been mined, bought up by the rich, and taken offline. Which means that it might never be money. The rich don't need to ever spend _any Bitcoin._ Ever. Never ever.
This is the thing people don't understand. Rich people collect assets, they don't sell them. If they had the need to sell assets to fund consumption, they would be poor, like us. They got rich by never needing to sell.
> Bad money drives out good.
> -- Gresham's Law
If 10k Bitcoin are owned by 10k people in equal amounts, then you can assume that they would eventually end up running out of _bad money_ and begin spending that _good money_ into the system. It might take a few months or years, but it wouldn't take longer than our lifetimes. And they would each need to sell some, so that would reduce the amount each of them held, which would total a considerable amount of sats coming back onto the market.
But if 1 person owns 10k Bitcoin, he doesn't need to ever sell a single satoshi. He can just lend out 1 Bitcoin and collect rents on that. He risks losing that Bitcoin, sure, but he still has the other 9999 to keep him happy and he can easily recuperate the loss by lending out another one. And he is still putting much fewer Bitcoin back on the market than the group of smaller holders collectively have.
That is why, once the wealthy control all of the wealth, it just stays there and monetary velocity grinds to a halt. They only need to move tiny amounts of assets, and they usually only move it to acquire more of it. Like the way whales will dump a bunch of Bitcoin on the market, all at once, wipe out traders, and then buy it back plus some more, at a cheaper price. Once you have so much of an asset, you can control the price.
And that is where we are now at.
This is the thing people don't understand. Rich people collect assets, they don't sell them. If they had the need to sell assets to fund consumption, they would be poor, like us. They got rich by never needing to sell.
> Bad money drives out good.
> -- Gresham's Law
If 10k Bitcoin are owned by 10k people in equal amounts, then you can assume that they would eventually end up running out of _bad money_ and begin spending that _good money_ into the system. It might take a few months or years, but it wouldn't take longer than our lifetimes. And they would each need to sell some, so that would reduce the amount each of them held, which would total a considerable amount of sats coming back onto the market.
But if 1 person owns 10k Bitcoin, he doesn't need to ever sell a single satoshi. He can just lend out 1 Bitcoin and collect rents on that. He risks losing that Bitcoin, sure, but he still has the other 9999 to keep him happy and he can easily recuperate the loss by lending out another one. And he is still putting much fewer Bitcoin back on the market than the group of smaller holders collectively have.
That is why, once the wealthy control all of the wealth, it just stays there and monetary velocity grinds to a halt. They only need to move tiny amounts of assets, and they usually only move it to acquire more of it. Like the way whales will dump a bunch of Bitcoin on the market, all at once, wipe out traders, and then buy it back plus some more, at a cheaper price. Once you have so much of an asset, you can control the price.
And that is where we are now at.
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