Bitcoin

A bitcoin is an entry in a public ledger that anyone can verify and nobody can revise. Ownership is a private key; transfer is a signed message; the ledger's history is secured by the cost of the computation that built it. There is no issuer, no redemption promise and no counterparty - which is the whole design and also the whole risk.

The supply schedule is the part that matters most for pricing. New coins enter only as a block subsidy paid to miners, that subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, and the total converges to just under 21 million. By 2026 roughly 95 percent of that total has been issued, so the flow of new supply is already small relative to the stock that exists.

That makes bitcoin a stock market rather than a flow market, in the same sense gold is: the price is set by who wants to hold what already exists, not by this month's production. A market question about the price is a question about demand for a fixed float.

The dominant use is holding it - as a long-duration position on scarcity, as collateral against dollar loans, and increasingly as a line in a diversified portfolio accessed through an exchange-traded fund rather than a wallet. Since the US spot ETFs launched in January 2024, most new institutional exposure has arrived in that wrapper, which changes who is buying and how quickly they can leave.

Payments remain a real but secondary use: cross-border settlement where the alternative is slow or blocked, and remittance corridors where fees matter more than volatility. Second-layer networks carry most of the small-payment traffic, which means on-chain transaction counts understate usage rather than measure it.

For a prediction market, the useful distinction is between uses that lock supply away for years and uses that recirculate it. A coin in an ETF is available to sell tomorrow. A coin held by a long-term holder through two cycles is, in practice, not part of the tradeable float.

Miners compete to produce a valid block roughly every ten minutes; the winner takes the block subsidy plus transaction fees. Difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks so that the ten-minute average holds no matter how much computing power joins or leaves. That adjustment is what makes the issuance schedule reliable rather than merely intended.

The subsidy halved to 3.125 BTC per block in April 2024 and is scheduled to halve again in 2028. Each halving cuts the new supply reaching the market in half overnight - a supply event with a known date, which is unusual enough to deserve care: an event everyone can see coming is usually priced long before it happens.

Where mining physically happens has shifted repeatedly, driven by electricity prices and policy. After China's 2021 ban the industry moved largely to North America, with meaningful capacity in Central Asia and the Gulf. Public geographic estimates lag by years because miners are not obliged to report location, so treat any country breakdown as a survey, not a census.