Bitcoin’s Only Scaling Limitation Is Its Supply
Why No More Than 5-10 Million People Will Ever Be Able To Use Bitcoin Sovereignly
Bitcoin’s scaling debate is often framed as a bandwidth problem—how to fit more transactions into the blockchain—but this is a misdirection. The real limitation isn’t transactions per second, it’s who can afford to use the chain at all.
Scaling proposals, particularly those involving new opcodes, are disingenuous because they don’t actually allow more people to use Bitcoin on-chain. Instead, they simply create pooled transaction structures that shift security assumptions away from Bitcoin's trustless model. These designs fundamentally introduce custodianship, reliance on coordinators, and lower the barrier for Sybil attacks, making them indistinguishable from any other shitcoin.
At its core, Bitcoin’s scalability limitation is its supply—not block size, not opcodes, not transaction pooling. And because Bitcoin’s supply is permanently capped at 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, that means only 5-10 million people will ever be able to use it in a sovereign way.
1. Bitcoin’s True Limit: The 2.1 Quadrillion Satoshi Cap
Bitcoin is often described as having a 21 million BTC cap, but that’s just an abstraction. The real cap is 2.1 quadrillion satoshis—the smallest indivisible unit of Bitcoin.
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Total supply: 2.1 quadrillion satoshis
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Minimum viable amount per user: At least 20,000+ sats (enough to afford transaction fees over time).
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Maximum possible sovereign users:
2.1 × 10^15 sats ÷ 20,000 sats/person = 105 million usersBut this assumes perfectly equal wealth distribution, which does not exist.
In reality:
- Whales and organizations hold a substantial percentage of all Bitcoin.
- Millions of BTC are lost, locked up, or inactive.
- Most people will never hold enough sats to transact meaningfully.
The result? The actual number of people who can afford to use Bitcoin in a sovereign way (without custodians or trusted third parties) is 5-10 million at most.
2. The Minimum Cost of On-Chain Transactions
Bitcoin isn’t free to use. Every transaction:
- Takes ~200-300 bytes.
- Requires at least 1 sat per byte in fees.
- Cannot send less than 546 sats due to dust limits.
At just 1 sat per byte, a 200-byte transaction costs 200 sats.
If someone only owns 20,000 sats, a single transaction at 200 sats already eats up 1% of their total holdings. A few transactions, and they’re locked out of the network forever.
Even if someone is holding Bitcoin, if their balance is too low, they cannot afford to move it, which functionally excludes them from the system.
3. Scaling Proposals Are a Distraction
Proposals to “scale” Bitcoin using new opcodes and transaction pooling attempt to sidestep this reality. The issue isn’t how many transactions can fit into a block, it’s how many people can afford to go on-chain in the first place.
Scaling proposals are fundamentally dishonest because:
- They don’t reduce the base cost of using Bitcoin.
- They don’t increase the number of people who can afford to be sovereign.
- They only bundle transactions together in a way that increases trust assumptions.
Pooling transactions together via new opcodes does not make Bitcoin more accessible. Instead, it shifts security into a coordinated system, requiring trusted operators who can go offline, harvest meta-data, collude to rug-pull users, or otherwise become centralized attack vectors.
If a pooling system anchors a group to the chain using one on-chain UTXO, what happens when a malicious actor, coordinator failure, or other complication needs to be resolved?
- The users must take their disputes on-chain—but if they can’t afford on-chain fees, they have no recourse.
- Attackers within the group can leverage Sybil attacks, overwhelming smaller users who cannot afford to challenge fraudulent transactions.
- The “solution” becomes no different from a shitcoin—just another system making negative security trade-offs.
Bitcoin is what it is, you can accept security trade-offs for yourself, but that thing you accept is not Bitcoin, and those trade-offs are definitely not “scaling” Bitcoin.
4. Layer 2 (Lightning) Doesn’t Fix This
No one has spent more time building for Lightning than I, and I'll be the first to tell you that while moving transactions off-chain does a lot of great things, scaling to new users isn't one of them. Lightning still requires an on-chain transaction to open and close a channel.
If a user cannot afford an on-chain transaction, they cannot afford to enter Lightning in the first place. This means:
- Lightning does not make Bitcoin cheaper for new users.
- Lightning does not increase the number of sovereign users.
- Lightning simply creates a second layer for those who can already afford on-chain fees.
The problem isn't TPS—it’s the cost of transacting at all.
At scale, Bitcoin’s model is not one of “everyone running their own node,” it’s one of a small minority having full sovereignty while the majority are priced into custodial services.
5. A Hard Fork for More Divisibility Won’t Happen
A hard fork to enable millisats (sub-satoshi units) would be a direct supply increase from 2.1 quadrillion satoshis to 2.1 quintillion millisats.
Bitcoin’s supply is hardcoded as an integer—it is not floating point, meaning there is no easy way to “add more decimal places” without actually changing the supply itself.
This would:
- Require a hard fork that breaks most shell applications.
- Violate Bitcoin’s fixed supply assumptions.
- Be politically impossible.
Because a hard fork is unlikely to ever happen, Bitcoin will remain permanently constrained by its 2.1 quadrillion satoshi cap—ensuring that only a small number of people can ever use it directly.
6. The Inescapable Conclusion
Bitcoin’s only scalability limitation is its supply. Because:
- A hard cap of 2.1 quadrillion sats exists.
- On-chain transaction costs create a permanent user barrier.
- True L2 solutions still require on-chain transactions to participate.
- New opcodes and pooling mechanisms don’t increase the number of people who can use Bitcoin trustlessly
- The only actual scaling solution, a hard-fork supply increase, is effectively impossible.
- Denial of these facts is cope or shitcoining.
The result?
Bitcoin can only support 5-10 million sovereign users, ever.
Everyone else will either be priced out or forced into trust-based solutions—which isn’t really Bitcoin.
Everyone else will either be priced out or forced into trust-based solutions—which isn’t really Bitcoin.
Every attempt to “scale” Bitcoin beyond this limit is just smuggling in trust, creating centralized points of failure that are indistinguishable from any other shitcoin.
The practical way forward is to keep trust localized to the family or community level, with tools like Lightning.Pub, and to make peace with this reality and love Bitcoin for what it is: Numéraire.