Blocktime
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Blocktime
Episode 33: Halving, Nodes, and the March to 21 Million
Dive deep into the enigma of Bitcoin's supply mechanics with our latest Block Time discussion. Your Host, Pierre and Producer Gabe take you on a journey through Bitcoin's backbone. They start by tackling the core concepts that set Bitcoin apart from conventional assets, emphasizing how it's underpinned by stringent mathematical and cryptographic rules. From the technicality of Satoshis to the sophistication of smart contracts, we'll leave no stone unturned as we dissect the foundational elements that comprise the Bitcoin network. You'll grasp the significance of the halvings and how they bring us closer to the 21 million Bitcoin limit and ponder the ramifications of software glitches and miners forfeiting their full rewards. This intriguing plot twist adds a layer of complexity to the ongoing saga of Bitcoin supply.
To wrap up, we'll explore the diverse behaviors of the Bitcoin community. You'll understand the delicate balance between the HODLers and the spenders and how this interplay influences the burgeoning market. We also underscore the importance of personal Bitcoin nodes, giving you insight into how they uphold the sanctity of this digital currency. By the end of this episode, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of Bitcoin's supply, trends, and the technological advancements like the Lightning Network that are shaping its future. Join us for a riveting session that's as much about the technology as it is about the philosophy of sound money.
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Welcome to the Block Time podcast produced by Riot Platforms, where we take a deep dive into topics relating to Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining and the energy grid. Today, I really want to zoom in on a Bitcoin topic, which is Bitcoin supply, so I'm joined here with our producer, Gabe. Gabe, thanks for humoring us on this.
Speaker 2:Of course, glad to be here. I'm excited to hear what you've got to talk about today.
Speaker 1:Yes, so this supply topic goes back to, I think, two things. One is Satoshi's initial launch of Bitcoin, and the second is to a controversy that occurred a few years ago, actually relating to Ethereum's supply, where folks were asking questions about how that gets calculated versus how Bitcoin supply gets calculated, just because there seemed to be some more fuzzy concepts on the Ethereum side. But for today's purposes, we're really going to zoom in on Bitcoin supply. I think it's a fascinating topic, and the first thing to note here is that Bitcoins are not backed by anything like a traditional asset. For example, before the dollar left the gold standard, a certain amount of gold would be backing every dollar, and so then you would have the opportunity, in theory, to redeem your paper dollars for gold, and so that's what is meant by. Is a currency backed by an asset? Is it convertible into a different asset at a fixed ratio? Now, bitcoin is not that way at all. Bitcoin is freely floating, and so really, what we can think of as Bitcoin being backed by is more metaphorical than an actual redemption process at a particular ratio. So people will say Bitcoin is backed by math or the network or cryptography, but these are more like metaphors Now when we look at how the ledger of Bitcoin operates, the first thing to note is that there's no concept of the unit of Bitcoins.
Speaker 1:At the technical level, it's only a piece of a Bitcoin called a Satoshi. So if you think of it like one dollar has 100 pennies Bitcoin, one Bitcoin has 100 million Satoshis, and in fact, the Bitcoin concept doesn't exist in the code, it's only. Satoshis Is a convenience layer that we add on top of Bitcoin to say, ok, well, you know, we're going to look at it as a BTC unit. So these Satoshis are locked up by smart contracts, and the context in which they're locked up is called an output. So an output is just a quantity of Satoshis, an integer number, combined with a script that has the spending conditions of who is able to unlock these Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:And so, in a way, if you have a private key, it's not that you have the Bitcoin, it's just that you have a private key that cannot unlock the Bitcoin. And so when you're running a Bitcoin node, you actually have everyone's Bitcoin on your node, and so you don't have everyone's private keys, and so that's why you cannot just move other people's Bitcoin, but your node is aware of all the Bitcoin and is carefully tracking the entire ledger in the background, so the owner of the Bitcoin is the person who would have the private key to unlock them, and it's interesting, though, that we can ask ourselves how those Bitcoin got on the ledger in the first place. There's a few different ways that we could think of where Satoshi could have put the Bitcoin on the ledger. One is that he could have started the Bitcoin network with all of the Bitcoin on the ledger on day zero.
Speaker 1:He didn't do that. Rather, he started with just hard coding. One output called the Genesis block, or it's in the Genesis block, but it's actually unspendable, and so the Bitcoin he did put on the ledger are forever lost. In that regard, no-transcript.
Speaker 2:What is the number of those that are locked?
Speaker 1:It was just. It was just 50 Bitcoin, it was just the first the first block we're yeah.
Speaker 1:In that hard-coded Genesis block and then afterwards, satoshi did mine a lot of Bitcoin. It's estimated he or somebody at the same time as he was around it was I mean, that's the. That's the thing about obsidian. You know that coins pretty pseudonymous. So we estimate that it's between 800,000 and 1.2 million Bitcoin that he mined. Now, what happened with his private key? We don't know. Those Bitcoin, by and large, have not moved since then, and so it raises a question of maybe the private key is lost or he's got I think the kids call it diamond hands when you know, versus lettuce hands hodling. Yeah, he's hodling, so we'll see. I mean, I Think those Bitcoin are gone forever, but there's no guarantees there.
Speaker 1:Now it's interesting to ask you know, how did Satoshi, how was he able to mine so many Bitcoin, whereas today, you know we struggle to mine a hundred Bitcoin? He was mining thousands, millions of Bitcoin, tens of hundred, thousands, and it really has to do with how the issuance of Bitcoin is scheduled. So when Satoshi publishes white paper, if you go read the white paper, it doesn't really explain how many Bitcoin are being you're going to be put onto the ledger. It explains a lot of other things, but it does not cover the specifics of Bitcoin's monetary policy. If you want to know what the specifics of the monetary policy are, it's not like the fiat system where you have to go to like a textbook and a professor, or you have to go to Jeremy Powell and ask him how he's feeling that day. Rather, you go to the source code, and in the case of the software that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote, the source code is in C++, and that's where we find the issuance schedule. It's a function called a get block subsidy, and this code essentially takes 50 in a what's called a binary format, and some zeros and ones. Takes that number 50, and then it cuts it in half by performing a binary shift, right shift operation on that number, and so this is a very Efficient way actually of calculating a number. It's somewhat arbitrary, though, and in fact, people often, you know theorize of why did Satoshi pick this, why these are hard-coded parameters, of Okay, we're gonna start out with 50, and then, if we cut that in half, eventually that is, after 33 or 32 halvings, depending on how you count it you would have zero as the as an issuance of Bitcoin, and you know how many times I heard you saying so.
Speaker 1:There is no, satoshi did not write an explanation of how he chose these parameters. It seems like they're kind of pulled out of a hat and from a monetary economics perspective, arguably it doesn't really matter. So, for example, if there was only going to be 21 million Bitcoin or only 22 million Bitcoin, it's arbitrary, and so you just have to pick a number and stick with it rather than trying to choose a different one. Now, the interesting thing as we dig in here is that it's not like he chose 21 million Bitcoin and then backed into a formula on how to get to 21 million. It seems like it's the opposite, where he picked a formula and then the result is 21 million.
Speaker 1:Now the halving that is, that right shift binary operation is dictated by how many blocks have been found by the time that we're running this getBlockSubsidy function. So he has it hard coded in there that there's a halving every 210,000 blocks. Now, 210,000 blocks, if there's a block every 10 minutes, on average, you get to about four years, and so every four years there's a halving. And maybe he chose this based on the presidential election cycle in the United States, that is, every four years, it's certainly not the. In France, it's every five years. So he was not taking any inspiration from the French electoral system. But again he didn't explain why four years was the right number to have a halving. Perhaps it's the Olympics every four years as well, that's correct, yeah, so maybe there's just a natural human element of four year cycles.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe so, but also, I mean, you mentioned the election cycle. It does line up, though. Every four years we're on the election year cycle, aren't we?
Speaker 1:That's right. So the halving is going to be this year in April and then the election will be in November. Do we have Olympics this year? I feel like we do. I'm not a big Olympics guy. Our audience will correct us on the Olympics dates. I think it's actually supposed to be in Paris at some point, but I don't want to speak.
Speaker 2:Yeah, producer Gabe is going to Google that real quick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, hey, pull that up, but anyhow yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, then, the other part of it that is somewhat arbitrary is the every 10 minutes. Now I think that there's a might be a little bit more science behind the every 10 minutes, which is basically what's the longest reasonable period of time that you would expect to propagate data across the Internet. Ideally it's instantaneous, but, as we know, there's latency and so you know, in terms of avoiding orphan blocks, it makes sense maybe to have 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just to follow up, the Summer Olympics 2024 will be hosted in July this year in Paris.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, we got all the facts right, just based off of just our vague memories. Okay, that's great. I will not be going, but to all who will be going, enjoy your time in Paris and.
Speaker 2:That one seems like something that you would go to Pierre. Any reason why you wouldn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I don't like very large crowds like that. I also, I do. I do like Paris a lot. I miss it, but I feel like I. What I like to do in Paris is probably not sit in a stadium watching any kind of sport.
Speaker 2:So I guess you know, I'd rather go to the museum, I'd rather see some historical sites than yeah, there's going to be a lot of people in Paris for that, so I guess you probably wouldn't have as great a time being at the museum with hundreds of thousands of extra people.
Speaker 1:Perhaps not, although maybe the argument here is that the museums will be empty because everybody will be at the Olympics.
Speaker 2:But the flip coin to that is because people are in Paris for the Olympics, they're going to want to go do other things as well, like museum tours.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. I think you're right, so I'll sit this one out. But you know I'll certainly be watching the highlights on on YouTube.
Speaker 2:I like seeing all the like fringe sports that you don't get a lot of coverage in like normal time. You know, like like no one gets to see curling like on TV other than when it's on the Olympics. But I guess it's not a summer sport.
Speaker 1:No, that that'll be in the Winter Olympics, which yeah, so yes archery.
Speaker 2:I like archery. Archery is a summer game.
Speaker 1:There we go. Well, I may. Are you going to be competing this year?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, I guess against my local forest animals maybe, but not in the competition.
Speaker 1:Yes, there are no forest animals in Paris. I mean, they're okay Anyway back to Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you off track very quick. So, yeah, the you know these. The intervals are somewhat arbitrary, but I think that they might have led to some phenomenon of people now look forward to the havings. So I think the other really interesting aspect of the havings is just how much Bitcoin gets essentially front loaded in its issuance. And so when we think about the epochs, right, the eras of Bitcoin's havings, you have the first one, which was, you know, 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. Do that over four years and then you end up with about 10 million Bitcoin. So by the end of that cycle, we were already half of the Bitcoin had been issued, and that was in the first four years. So from 2009, basically until 2012, that that was the issuance. Now then, in 2012 to 2016, that got because of the having. It was 25 minutes, or sorry, 25 bitcoins every 10 minutes, and by the end of that epoch, 15 million Bitcoin were on the ledger. So already you know it's a super majority of the Bitcoin were on the ledger in the first eight years.
Speaker 2:Now, I might have a silly question. Sorry to start it. No, not at all. So as I understand it, every four years we have a having, and then there's also a year in which the havings end. Is that correct? Do you remember that off the top of your head?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's scheduled to be for 21 40, I believe, and that is really about the last Satoshi being added to the ledger.
Speaker 2:So that was my question. Like I mean, in my head you know every number is divisible by two, like for it, you know eternity, right? So you could be down to sats, and then half of sats, and then half of sats, and then so why does it end and why doesn't it just keep splitting into like decimal points?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a great question. So that's really because of how Satoshi programmed the, how the having happens. So that right shift operation essentially adds a zero to the binary, and the binary is it has a fixed length, and so every time he adds, or every time the having adds a zero at the beginning, that that knocks off a one at the end. And so eventually, because it only is 32 zeros and ones, if you've zeroed out it all, then you're multiplying with by zero, and so it's kind of I mean it's tricky in the sense that it's not cutting the 50 and half using division. It is kind of playing some computer science games on the number to have it get to zero within 32 halvings and to effectively be cutting in half until then. And so if it was longer than 32 digits, more than 32 zeros and ones, then yes, we would see that happen.
Speaker 2:And why is it 32? Is that some sort of computer code that's kind of predetermined?
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's interesting because the number of right shift operations is really based on how many halvings have happened. So how many times have we gone around 210,000 blocks and then the number that you know, the zeros and ones that are being cut in half? That was essentially arbitrary, although it really is about how many essentially, how big of a number can Satoshi's be? And that really that gets into kind of the computer science of integers inside of C++. And yeah, I mean, if any of these variables had changed even by a little bit, we would be having a completely different conversation around what the halving is and when it is.
Speaker 2:Cool. I think I got a better understanding of that now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the schedule by being front loaded, it really did put a lot of Bitcoin into circulation.
Speaker 1:Now you could also imagine a scenario where it had been more front loaded, so you could have had a halving every two weeks, and so, after you know, 64 weeks, it would be zeroed out and all the Bitcoin would be on the ledger. So it seems like Satoshi was trying to strike some kind of balance between having two more Bitcoin on the ledger upfront versus later in terms of trickling it out. But again, you know, we don't know what the alternative reality would be. What we do know is that, you know, with the third halving that happened four years ago, the total supply was 18 million Bitcoin at that point, and now, with this halving in April, it's going to be 19.6 million, and then the next halving it's going to be finally 20 million and it's asymptotically gonna approach 21 million. Now, interestingly, it never really gets the 21 million Bitcoin because this function only accumulates to, in sans terms, two quadrillion 99 trillion 999 billion, 997 million 690,000. And so it's an astronomically large number, but ultimately it does get cut off between actually reaching 2.1 quadrillion or 21 million Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:So there will never be a full 21 million Correct Interesting. That's the first I've heard of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll always be short 2.3 million Satoshis, gotcha, which is okay because it goes in the direction of deflation. Right, it would be a problem if we were a little bit over 21 million Bitcoin, I feel like you know. Then we'd have to say we'd have to say things like, yeah, there will only ever be a little bit more than 21 million Bitcoin, but really what we should say is there will only ever be Almost, yeah, 21 million Bitcoin. Now the other interesting aspect of adding Bitcoin to the ledger so the miner can claim up to that number of what's the subsidy.
Speaker 1:So in this case, you know today, 3. Sorry, 6.25 Bitcoin. So every 10 minutes, the mining pool that is constructing the block can award themselves up to 6.25 Bitcoin, plus the transaction fees that are in the block. But let's assume that it's an empty block, for whatever reason. Then if they try to claim more than that, their block gets rejected by the nodes as being invalid because they're not claiming or they're claiming too much Bitcoin. Interestingly, they can claim too little Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network will allow them to do that. It's just that now those Bitcoin are essentially forever destroyed because they went unclaimed and there's no way to. It's not like roll over minutes with your cell phone plan, right? You're not gonna be able to claim those Bitcoin in the future.
Speaker 2:Has that happened before? Unclaimed Bitcoin in a block.
Speaker 1:It has yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, interestingly enough, due to bugs in the software and people trying to do something clever, I guess. So there's that part, and so that's actually what's called the Coinbase Transaction, and I know that there's an exchange they call themselves Coinbase they stole their name from the Coinbase Transaction which is really about rewarding the mining pool or the miners for their work. But in any case, the special transaction, it doesn't have any inputs, it only can create outputs, and so these outputs are what is adding Bitcoin to the ledger, and it's also it's recirculating the transaction fees that got pulled out of all the other transactions in that block. So when we think about what is the total Bitcoin supply, we can look at it through different lenses. We can look at it through the lens of what do we expect it to be, and so that really gets to the having schedule and the issuance schedule, and so we can have an expectation of what is the ceiling on the supply. But then, ultimately, we know that there are Bitcoin that have not been claimed out of that issuance schedule historically, and so we would have to adjust the expected issuance by the actual issuance, and that we can look at what's called the UTXO set. So the UTXO set is really Bitcoin's balance sheet. It's a snap if you look at in between blocks, a snapshot in time of, okay, who has Bitcoin, what are all the different balances, and so this is a set of all the outputs that have not been spent, that could be spent in the future, and the UTXO set has actually become very large, and now there's, I think, upwards of probably 200 million UTXOs in the UTXO set 217 million, so each UTXO is securing a certain quantity of Bitcoin, of Satoshis.
Speaker 1:Now, interestingly, some of these outputs are also unspendable. That is, that we know, based on how the contract is written or based on bugs that are in the Bitcoin software, that these Bitcoin will never be spent, and so, in fact, there's an argument of well, the software doesn't really need to track them anymore, so it could be removed is one thing. So, essentially, what we have to look at is not just what do we expect issuance to be or what are the current balances, but we have to reconcile those two, and because we know there are differences between the expected issuance and today's balances, that means that there are items that would allow us to reconcile it. Now, a Bitcoin developer his name is Fabian Jar. He has actually put together a really excellent tool for identifying where the missing Bitcoin are, and this is the Coin Stats Index, and this really provides us a granular reconciliation of Bitcoin supply.
Speaker 1:Now it's important to keep in mind that we're really looking at Bitcoin supply from a technical perspective, from an economic perspective and kind of outside of the Bitcoin system.
Speaker 1:You know, as I mentioned, with Satoshi's Bitcoin, it could be the case that the private key has been lost, but there's no way for us to know that just by observing what's going on on the blockchain.
Speaker 1:It's a guess we have to make, but by observing the blockchain, there are some things that we do know are unspendable, and so we can remove those from kind of the circulating supply. Now, today, if we look at it, it's approximately a 182 Bitcoin that are unspendable and that have been kind of permanently lost, and that's kind of the difference between what the expected issuance is and the sum of all of the balances today. So on one hand, it's good that we don't have any inflation, right. So it would be bad if unexpected Bitcoin had been added to the ledger. But the system is set up in such a way that you can shoot yourself in the foot, you can accidentally destroy Bitcoin, and that has happened to 182 Bitcoin that will never be spendable, and so that is something that is only visible if we actually dig into the numbers and perform a reconciliation between what our expectations were and what the actual data is on the blockchain.
Speaker 2:Pierre, what was that tool that you just mentioned that identifies lost blocks or lost Bitcoin?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's called the CoinStats Index. It's part of the Node software. So the Node software is, you can think of it like a web browser. It's what allows you to connect to the Bitcoin network and to kind of browse the Bitcoin network. But it's also it's a lot like BitTorrent in the sense that you're downloading the whole internet, or the equivalent of it in Bitcoin terms right, the whole history of Bitcoin, all the transactions, all the blocks. You download it onto your computer.
Speaker 1:It verifies all of it and if you turn on CoinStats, coinstats Index, while while it is processing the blockchain, it is also building up this index such that at every block height, you have this reconciliation being performed, and so you can actually see for yourself that there are no situations where some Bitcoin got added to the ledger outside of the rules at one height and then removed at the next height. That's always a risk in accounting, is? It's not enough to look at what the balances are today? You also have to look historically at OK, well, what were the balances? Just to make sure that there was no funny business that got kind of hidden up in the ledger.
Speaker 2:Is there? Is there any particular reason that those 182 have been lost? Does it give reasons why that they're no longer in circulation?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. One example is related to it's called BIP 30. And it was kind of a strange bug that emerged at block ninety one thousand eight hundred eighty, so pretty early on in Bitcoin's history, where you had the same transaction ID for two different transactions. And that's not OK. You can't have that. So unilaterally, one of the transaction IDs is deemed bad, you know, void, invalid, invalid, and so those Bitcoin are destroyed.
Speaker 2:It's, and I assume some of the other Bitcoin that were lost are due to unclaimed, like we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1:That's correct. So that's yeah. Now the. So the first 50 Bitcoin is the Genesis block.
Speaker 2:And that's counted in the 182.
Speaker 1:Yeah, correct. So then you got one 32 left, and then that bug it actually invalidated both transaction IDs. So that was 100 Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Ok, so now you're down to 32 Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:And then you have contracts that have what's called opera turn, which you can think of it as, like this person burned their Bitcoin by sending it to opera turn and it's permanently unspendable, and that's 3.7 Bitcoin. So now you're down to 28 Bitcoin, and then there's there's a limit on how big the contract can be, and so if you put in a contract that's greater than that limit, you can do that. You just won't be able to spend it, and that's that. That's actually a very small amount. So that is, let's see. Actually, you know what? There's never been any cases of that. So we're still at 28 Bitcoin. Just following what Fabian's explanation was, and that it really is, that remaining 28.9 Bitcoin that is, bitcoin miners who did not claim the full reward is kind of the the remaining part of it.
Speaker 2:Is there a time limit on claiming rewards? Could those be retroactively claimed?
Speaker 1:No, they have to be claimed when you create the block, and this is something that is really, and most recently, at 500 526 526,591, somebody did not claim 6.25 Bitcoin. Now, it would be interesting to see who that was, and I'm pulling it up.
Speaker 2:Would that be like probably? I mean, I guess you're going to find that out here shortly but would that be? Like an individual miner maybe, and that's not necessarily part of a pool, because I feel like in the pool mining, those rewards are like like you can't not claim that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Well, if a pool is running like their custom software, they could have a bug in the software.
Speaker 1:They could have a bug, and so there actually has also been a bug in the opposite direction of trying to claim too much, and this happened, I believe, in 2017. And that block everyone saw it, but everyone marked it as invalid. And the bug there was that they had tried to claim transaction fees but they forgot to include the transactions in the block, and so it looked like they were trying to cheat from doing that. But it's really I mean, these missing Bitcoin. In some sense. If we're only talking about 183 Bitcoin, it's not a tremendous amount from the network perspective. What I think is probably and that's very much at a technical level but if we keep zooming out of, okay, well, you've got the Bitcoin that had been lost, so there's no private key that eclipses this technically unspendable amount. Now, what percentage? People debate, and it goes back to that approximately.
Speaker 1:I think that the estimates go from one to seven million Bitcoin, and then we can also look at more recently, kind of how much our Bitcoin moving, and so in a bear market like we've had over the past let's call it a year, year and a half what we're looking at is that it's really a small percentage of the Bitcoin that are actually circulating, and if we look at kind of the seven day moving average, it's about a million Bitcoin that are circulating that get spent.
Speaker 1:Now, during a bull market, that number is a much greater amount, and during the previous bull market it was more like two million all the way up to like four million, and that's really. That's driven by a number of different factors, but most obviously perhaps is that if you have early adopters who have been holding Bitcoin for a long period of time so long that it might even look like they've lost their private key but if the Bitcoin price makes a run, then maybe they want to move some of those Bitcoin to an exchange, liquidate them in order to rebalance their portfolio or to buy a Lambo or donate to their favorite charity, whatever the proceeds are going towards. And so that's why we see a lot more activity in the UTXO set of old UTXOs kind of resurfacing during bull markets and then during bear markets. Everybody's kind of sitting on their hands right and they're just. You know, if anything, they're just accumulating, they're not trying to spend their Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:I see it as like two camps and then some overlap in the middle, where it's like one camp is holders you know, long term investors and then the other camp is like daily users, where their local currency doesn't work for them, so they're transacting on the Bitcoin network and that's obviously an overlap, where there are users who are both saving and spending as their main form of currency.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense that you've basically got kind of a barbell distribution. And the other great analysis on there is from Unchained. They have HODL waves which basically put stratifies, the UTXOs, based on when they were created, meaning kind of when they were last touched, those Bitcoin, and upwards of 16% of the Bitcoin supply has not moved in more than 10 years, and so that's a substantial percentage. And then if we look at, ok, well, what percentage has moved within the past 24 hours? It's 1.1%, and so then you know pretty even distribution between those two points. But you know, if we look at what's kind of the 50% range, it's the one to two year holding. So 50% of Bitcoin have been held longer than one to two years and then 50% have been held less than one to two years, which I think that kind of goes to.
Speaker 1:What you were saying is that you've got this division between the long term saving and the short term trading and spending type economies. Now I think that over the decades well, over the past decade and over the coming decades, I think the trend will continue to be that more and more Bitcoin goes into long term cold storage as a percentage of the total supply, but the velocity on kind of the short term side will also increase, and so we'll see more spending and more saving, and that's actually feasible, you know, with layer two networks like Lightning as well, where you know a Lightning channel might be opened once a year, but then that Lightning channel could be sending payments back and forth all year long you know, multiple times over, and so that might throw a wrench into our ability to quantify these two different economies using on-chain metrics, if, kind of the landscape of how people are using Bitcoin is changing at the same time. Ok, so I mean, I think that you know the other part of why does this matter is really to the sound money aspect of it that one of the central guarantees of Bitcoin to the users is that if you hold one Bitcoin, you have a fixed percentage of the total Bitcoin supply. And the only way to verify that you actually do have a fixed percentage of the total Bitcoin supply without having to trust the third party is to run your own Bitcoin node, and not just that, but to use it, to use it in order to run this reconciliation and to see, ok, well, I was expecting, you know, almost 21 million Bitcoin, and what do I see? Almost 21 million Bitcoin. So that ensures that your expectations as a holder of Bitcoin are aligned with what is actually happening on the network, to make sure that there's no funny business going on and to provide that fully cryptographic, open source transparency that is frankly lacking in a lot of other monetary systems, where you know it's not so straightforward.
Speaker 1:All right, well, I hope this was an interesting dive into what Bitcoin supply is, where it comes from and kind of what are some of the oddities and some of the trivia around that supply as we head into the fourth having here in April. Thanks for joining us. If you have any questions or comments on today's topic or any other topics, feel free to reach out and, as always, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and, before we close out, I wanted to see if, gabe, if there were some questions that on your end that I didn't address.
Speaker 2:No, it was a great episode. I learned some stuff. Obviously, I had some questions for you throughout. I did want to mention to our audience that we are still accepting applications for our internship programs, so please get those in if you're at all interested in interning for Riot over the summer. Pierre, thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, and when I was looking at the internship roles on LinkedIn, I saw that we've got a lot of other roles open as well. So if you're in particular, in the course of Canada DFW area, we are, you know, building our phase one there, and so there's lots of roles available. So definitely check out our LinkedIn and looking forward to the next episode. Cheers.
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