“Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge.“, the words of Satoshi Nakamoto on the scarcity of Bitcoin, 13 years ago.

If you would today ask people what is one of the biggest advantages of Bitcoin that put it apart from almost anything in the world, they would probably answer with the scarcity of Bitcoin. This concept of Bitcoin being super-scarce at 21M coins over its whole life-time was also done by Satoshi Nakamoto and was always meant to be one of the biggest traits of Bitcoin. In other words, Satoshi exactly knew what he was doing there.

Here is the publication by Satoshi Nakamoto on the 6th February 2010 on a Forum:

​

Picture from documentingbtc on Twitter

At first you can already see how Satoshi Nakamoto says “if it really gets huge“ we will have 21M coins, clearly showing that he never knew how far he would get with this project of his and he definitely could not have thought it would be where it is today. He definitely was not in for his money but actually wanted to propose a change of his to the world.

The next two paragraphs are basically him talking about the problem that if it gets huge it will be difficult to be using decimal places to represent the value you hold as people won‘t be able to casually be 1BTC anymore. It is fascinating that this is actually a topic today. He proposed that we increase the decimal places and/or add a “,“ to make it a visually better number.

Today, we know that we seem to tackle this problem by calling it mBTC (milli-Bitcoin) or more popularly a Satoshi, 1 BTC = 1000 mBTC and 1 mBTC = 10 Satoshi. Especially in the future it will get way more normal to talk about how many Satoshi or mBTC you have instead of BTC itself.