Brutally Honest Truth About Bitcoin
benny · April 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Author: Wesley Schlemmer, founder of Bitcoin Bay (first Bitcoin meetup nonprofit in the country) Source: Original YouTube Video
The brutally honest truth about Bitcoin: if you own any amount right now, you're richer than you think. Not because of today's price — because of what's about to happen. And most people have no idea how big this is going to get.
Less than 5% of the global population owns any Bitcoin at all. Not "owns a lot of Bitcoin" — any.
If you have even a fraction of a coin in some wallet right now, you're already in the top 5% of the entire planet.
We're At The Bitcoin Equivalent Of The Internet In 1997
In adoption terms, Bitcoin is roughly where the internet was in 1997 — before a lot of people were even born. Email existed. Amazon had just gone public. Most people had heard of the internet but weren't using it for anything real. Anyone who said "this is going to change everything" sounded insane. Peter Schiff said it would be as useless as the fax machine.
That's exactly where we are with Bitcoin right now:
- The infrastructure is being built.
- ETFs brought Wall Street in.
- Public companies hold over a million coins on their balance sheets.
- But the average person still thinks it's gambling money. They still don't own any.
The Real Supply Is Already Shrinking
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. Hard cap. Can never be changed.
But here's what most people don't factor in:
- Roughly 4 million coins are lost forever — locked in wallets where the keys are destroyed or the owner is dead. (You've heard about the guy whose Bitcoin sits in a landfill.)
- Real circulating supply is closer to 16–17 million.
- Of those 17 million, nation-states, corporations, and long-term holders are locking up more every single day.
Venezuela is reportedly sitting on around 600,000 coins. Strategy keeps buying. ETFs keep accumulating more than is being mined daily. The available Bitcoin — the coins actually for sale — is shrinking.
If you hold even 0.1 BTC today (~$8,000), you may own more than 99% of the people who will ever try to buy Bitcoin in the future. That's just the math.
But Here's What Almost Nobody Is Connecting
Bitcoin's adoption curve isn't happening in isolation. It's about to collide with another exponential curve. And when those two meet, everything changes.
Technology Is Deflationary
Once you see this, you can't unsee it: technology makes things faster, cheaper, and more abundant.
- Phone calls used to cost dollars per minute. Now they're basically free.
- Photography used to require film and waiting. Now it's instant and costs nothing.
- Music was $15 an album. Now it's $10 a month for every song ever recorded.
Technology pushes prices down. Always has. Always will.
AI Is The Most Deflationary Force Ever Created
And I'm not saying that lightly. Here's why.
Every previous technology disrupted one specific industry at a time. The printing press disrupted publishing. The assembly line disrupted manufacturing. The internet disrupted communication and retail.
AI disrupts everything simultaneously. It's automating knowledge work — coding, legal, finance, content creation, customer service, medical diagnostics, design, translation, strategy. Work that used to take 10 people and half a million dollars can now be done by one person with an AI subscription.
That's not a 10% savings. It's a 90% cost reduction across every industry, at the same time.
So Why Does Everything Feel More Expensive?
This is the question Jeff Booth asks in The Price of Tomorrow — maybe the most important economic question of our lifetime.
If technology is making everything cheaper, why does everything feel more expensive?
Simple answer: governments are printing money to offset deflation.
Deflation terrifies governments because it makes debt harder to pay and shrinks tax revenue. So they do the one thing they know how to do — print. They inflate the currency to mask the natural deflation technology creates.
The result is the world you live in:
- Technology pushes prices down.
- Money printing pushes prices up.
- You're caught in the middle.
- Salary stays flat. Savings lose purchasing power. The actual cost of producing things is plummeting thanks to AI.
So where does that value go? Right now, it gets absorbed by inflation. The abundance AI creates — the savings, efficiency, lower costs — you never see it, because it's eaten by currency debasement.
Unless you hold an asset that can't be printed.
The One Asset Designed For This Exact Moment
In a deflationary world, you want to hold the scarcest asset possible. Because if the cost of goods is falling, your money buys more over time — but only if your money can't be printed.
| Dollars | Bitcoin | |
|---|---|---|
| Supply | Expands every year | 21 million, fixed |
| Behavior in a deflationary economy | Erodes (treadmill speeds up) | Buys more over time |
| Who controls it | Central banks | Code |
Each Bitcoin buys more and more over time — not because Bitcoin changes, but because the world around it gets more abundant while Bitcoin stays scarce.
That's the collision. AI creates abundance. Bitcoin captures that abundance as purchasing power. Technology deflates prices. Bitcoin absorbs the deflation as value.
The Second Force: AI Itself Needs Bitcoin
AI agents are starting to operate autonomously right now. They're booking services, purchasing compute, drawing data, paying each other. This isn't hypothetical — it's happening today.
But these AI agents:
- Can't open a bank account
- Can't apply for a credit card
- Don't have a social security number
They need money that's permissionless, programmable, and operates 24/7 with no intermediary. Money that's as digital and borderless as they are. That's Bitcoin.
Two Exponential Curves, One Fixed Supply
So now there are two demand drivers hitting at the same time — both exponential, both accelerating, both targeting the same 21 million coins:
Curve 1 — Humans buying Bitcoin because it's the best savings technology in a deflationary world. As AI makes everything cheaper, the incentive to save in Bitcoin instead of dollars gets stronger every year.
Curve 2 — Machines using Bitcoin because it's the only money that works for AI. As AI agents multiply from thousands to millions to billions, transaction demand for permissionless money explodes.
These curves feed each other:
- More AI adoption → more deflationary pressure → more reason to hold Bitcoin.
- More Bitcoin adoption → better infrastructure → more AI agents using it.
It's a compounding loop almost nobody sees yet.
What This Means For You
Let's make it practical.
If AI makes goods and services 10x cheaper over the next decade — and that might be conservative — the purchasing power of each Bitcoin should rise proportionally. Even if the dollar price of Bitcoin stayed completely flat, your Bitcoin would buy 10x more stuff. Your standard of living goes up just by holding.
But the dollar price won't stay flat — because governments will keep printing to fight technological deflation. More printing means more debasement. More debasement means a higher Bitcoin price in dollar terms.
You win on both sides:
- Bitcoin buys more because things get cheaper.
- Bitcoin's dollar price goes up because the dollar gets debased.
This is what Jeff Booth means when he talks about abundance. In a world of sound money and technological deflation, everyone gets richer over time — not because you worked harder or picked the right stock, but because the money you saved actually gained purchasing power instead of losing it.
Key Takeaways
- Less than 5% of humans own any Bitcoin. If you do, you're already in the top 5% globally.
- Real circulating supply is closer to 16–17M, not 21M, and it's shrinking as institutions and nation-states lock up more every day.
- AI is the most deflationary force in history — disrupting every industry simultaneously, not one at a time.
- Governments print to mask deflation. The abundance technology creates gets eaten by currency debasement — unless you own a fixed-supply asset.
- Two exponential adoption curves are converging on 21M coins: humans saving in sound money, and machines transacting in permissionless money.
- You don't need a lot. Scarcity + deflation + dual adoption means even a modest position today could be life-changing in a decade.
If you own any Bitcoin at all, you're not just early to Bitcoin — you're early to the biggest economic transformation in human history.
Educational purposes only; not financial advice. Bitcoin Bay Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Tampa, FL (EIN: 93-1453566).