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BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has highlighted Bitcoin's fundamental scarcity problem and how it impacts millionaires.
In a recent article, the firm's analysts underlined that Bitcoin's limited total supply is capped at 21 million tokens, with only 3 to 4 million in circulation. This limited supply, they noted, is insufficient to cater to potential demand from millionaires.
"As many know, there is a predictable issuance schedule of new Bitcoin until 2140 with a pre-programmed max supply of 21 million tokens," wrote BlackRock multi-asset portfolio constructors Michael Gates and Brett Wager in their analysis. "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."
The duo explained that, unlike gold, Bitcoin's scarcity would impact millionaires' ability to access the asset: "To illustrate how few available Bitcoins there are, if every millionaire in the U.S. asked their financial advisor to get them 1 Bitcoin, there wouldn’t be enough," they wrote.
America is home to approximately 22 million millionaires, with nearly one in 15 citizens owning more than $1 million, according to UBS’ most recent global wealth report. This means that demand for Bitcoin from just U.S. millionaires alone would far exceed the available supply.
BlackRock, which has $11.6 trillion of assets under management, maintains the highly-popular iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), one of America's first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The fund has amassed nearly $60 billion in investor assets since its 2024 launch.