Since its advent in 2009, the Bitcoin network has processed more than a billion transactions and survived numerous extinction-worthy industry cataclysms (various media outlets and other financial industry commentators have declared bitcoin “dead” several hundred times over the years).

Despite this impressive resilience, bitcoin has often been met with confusion, skepticism. The bitcoin learning curve is steep, and the process of appreciation can take time.

In fact, something as simple as defining bitcoin can still be a messy exercise even today. It doesn’t fit neatly into any single conventional paradigm.

At a minimum, we can say bitcoin is a digitally native, bearer asset, equipped with cleverly embedded mechanics to communicate value across the internet in a way that is bankless, borderless, permissionless, cost-efficient, fast, and indiscriminate.

One might see how that is a compelling value proposition.

But there’s more. Bitcoin has a defined monetary policy engineered into its DNA (perhaps more relevant now in an era of growing sovereign deficits and profligate government spending) and is also uniquely inelastic to demand. Unlike gold, to which bitcoin is often compared, there’s no ability to meet excess demand with increased supply.

As many know, there is a predictable issuance schedule of new bitcoin until 2140 with a pre-programmed max supply of 21 million tokens. However, less widely known is that the real available float is likely far smaller, with a conservative estimate of 3 to 4 million issued bitcoins visible on the blockchain but considered permanently inaccessible (and therefore out of circulation) due to lost, forgotten, or otherwise destroyed keys.

To illustrate how few available bitcoins there are, if every millionaire in the US asked their financial advisor to get them 1 bitcoin, there wouldn’t be enough.

Bitcoin’s decentralized network also makes it resilient to unauthorized third-party overreach, including corporate and government censorship. Such powerful features can of course be exploited for good and for ill – but as with all revolutionary technology, many are slowly (if even reluctantly) beginning to consider the possibility that the upside could outweigh the downside.