​Jamie Dimon, BTC scarcity, and the code.

JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, is back at it.

He's a big skeptic of Bitcoin - and that's fine, plenty of people are!

So we've taken his sarcastic question, and used it as an opportunity to discuss a very important topic: scarcity.

In an interview on Squark Box yesterday, Dimon said “How do you know it's gonna stop at 21 million? Maybe it's gonna get to 21 million and Satoshi’s picture is gonna come up and laugh at you all.”

So what's he talking about?

One of the beautiful things about Bitcoin is that it has scarcity built in.

There are, and will only ever be, 21M total BTC.

How do we know? Because it's in the code.

​Bitcoin’s codebase is open source and freely viewable by the entire world.

Bitcoin is programmed to cut its rate of supply issuance in half every 210,000 blocks, which is roughly every four years.

Where there were 50 new BTC issued per block in 2009, only 6.25 BTC are mined with each block today.

(And that's set to halve again in early 2024).

After 33 times, Bitcoin’s block reward will be cut to zero.

Now, unlike money that can continue to be printed, that's scarce.

Is there an argument against this? Could there be an element of truth to Dimon's questions?

Well, technically, anything enforced by code can be changed, so long as a majority of users consent to it.

Some say that the Bitcoin community will be forced to make this change in order to support the BTC mining industry.

But, we can't even get a majority of people to agree on whether this dress is blue and black or gold and white. Chances of that many people agreeing to change the fundamentals of BTC seems unlikely.

The good news is, at the current rate, that decision won't have to happen until around 2140.

117 more years of peace.