Give or take, there’s about 50 million, millionaires in the world. If every single one of them wanted just one Bitcoin, and they each wanted to pay $1 Million USD per coin, they would not be able to have an entire coin while maintaining a $1M per coin price.
Think about it like this.
We call this the Sandwich Dilemma.
You are hosting a last minute party for 10 friends.
You only have enough bread to make 5 PB & J sandwiches.
Now you have run into a dilemma because each friend wants a full sandwich to themselves.
But there are only 5 sandwiches…and there are 10 people. Normally you would just cut them in half and call it a day but your friends are really hungry. You even agreed to hold down a sandwich for Jack…he gave you $10 earlier so that he could have one to himself. What a savage. I always though Jack could lose a couple of extra pounds..
So now there’s really only 4 Sandwiches for 9 people. That means that the remaining 9 guests can only have 0.44 of a sandwich.
That’s like getting a half sandwich with a bite taken out.
Even if everyone else offers you $20 for a full sandwich, you would never be able to allocate more than .44 sandwiches to every person.
The only way everyone can enjoy some sammies is by cutting them into smaller pieces and sharing it.
Thankfully, Bitcoin isn’t a sandwich and this is just a terrible analogy. We feel that using terrible analogies and understanding how they fail when comparing it to something like Bitcoin is a very useful technique of understanding the technology and its purpose.
The thing about sandwiches is that we don’t really care about how much sandwich we really eat, what we care about is being satisfied and not hungry anymore. We crave and desire only as much sandwich as we perceive would satisfy our hunger.
As the Bitcoin network grows, the purchasing power of each individual Satoshi will grow as well. This is important to understand because people don’t really want Bitcoin or green strips of money.
What they want is the ability to hold their time and use it in the future or send it around the world to their family and friends so they can use the time they spent working or building something.
If eventually the decimal needs to be moved, it does not matter that Bitcoin infinitely divisible. The network can also literally run off of one Bitcoin. Your “Sandwich” will never perish unless you lose your key. It’s also not a bad thing to own “part” of a Bitcoin.
Unlike a sandwich, once you own your sandwich, no one can take it away from you and give you less sandwich. You have secured your portion of sandwich forever or until you decide to use it.