⚡📰 Scaling DEBUNKED: No More Than 5-10 Million Can Use Bitcoin, EVER! 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. Thereallimitation isn’t transactions per second, it’swho can afford to use the chain at all. Scaling proposals, particularly those involving new opcodes, aredisingenuousbecause they don’t actually allow more people to use Bitcoin on-chain. Instead, they simply createpooled transaction structures that shift security assumptions away from Bitcoin's trustless model. These designs fundamentally introducecustodianship, reliance oncoordinators, and lower the barrier forSybil attacks, making themindistinguishable 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 permanentlycapped at 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, that meansonly 5-10 million people will ever be able to use it in a sovereign way. Bitcoin is often described as having a21 million BTC cap, but that’s just an abstraction. The real cap is2.1 quadrillion satoshis—the smallest indivisible unit of Bitcoin. Total supply:2.1 quadrillion satoshis Minimum viable amount per user:At least20,000+ sats(enough to afford transaction fees over time). Maximum possible sovereign users:2.1 × 10^15 sats ÷ 20,000 sats/person = 105 million users But this assumesperfectly equal wealth distribution, which does not exist. In reality: The result? Theactual number of people who can afford to use Bitcoinin asovereignway (without custodians or trusted third parties) is5-10 million at most. Bitcoin isn’t free to use. Every transaction: At just1 sat per byte, a200-byte transactioncosts200 sats. If someone only owns20,000 sats, asingle transaction at 200 satsalready eats up1% of their total holdings. A few transactions, and they’re locked out of the networkforever. Even if someone is holding Bitcoin, if their balance is too low, theycannot afford to move it, which functionally excludes them from the system. Proposals to “scale” Bitcoin usingnew opcodes and transaction poolingattempt to sidestep this reality. The issue isn’thow many transactions can fit into a block, it’show many people can afford to go on-chain in the first place. Scaling proposals arefundamentally dishonestbecause: Pooling transactions together via new opcodesdoes not make Bitcoin more accessible. Instead, it shifts security into acoordinated system, requiringtrusted operatorswho can go offline, harvest meta-data, collude to rug-pull users, or otherwise become centralized attack vectors. If a pooling systemanchors 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? 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. No one has spent more time building for Lightning than I, and I'll be the first to tell you that while moving transactionsoff-chaindoes 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 usercannot afford an on-chain transaction, theycannot afford to enter Lightning in the first place. This means: The problem isn't TPS—it’s thecost of transacting at all. At scale, Bitcoin’s model is not one of “everyone running their own node,” it’s one ofa small minority having full sovereignty while the majority are priced into custodial services. A hard fork to enablemillisats(sub-satoshi units)would be a direct supply increasefrom 2.1 quadrillion satoshis to2.1 quintillion millisats. Bitcoin’s supply ishardcoded as an integer—it isnot floating point, meaning there is no easy way to “add more decimal places” without actually changing the supply itself. This would: Because ahard fork is unlikely to ever happen, Bitcoin will remain permanently constrained by its2.1 quadrillion satoshi cap—ensuring thatonly a small number of people can ever use it directly. Bitcoin’s onlyscalability limitation is its supply. Because: Bitcoin canonly support 5-10 million sovereign users, ever.Everyone else willeither be priced out or forced into trust-based solutions—which isn’t really Bitcoin. Every attempt to “scale” Bitcoin beyond this limit is justsmuggling in trust, creating centralized points of failure that areindistinguishable from any other shitcoin. The practical way forward is to keep trust localized to the family or community level, with tools likeLightning.Pub, and to make peace with this reality and love Bitcoin for what it is:Numéraire. By @justin_shocknet (3820 sats, 8 zappers) | [Stacker News](https://stacker.news/items/912374/r/botlab)