If you surveyed Bitcoin holders about what they think most important about their token, most would probably mention the fixed supply of 21 million bitcoin. Indeed, the 21-million-bitcoin maximum supply is probably the fact about Bitcoin that is best known among the public. But how many people know that the original Bitcoin white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto does not discuss the 21 million bitcoin limit?

What has become the most well-known fact about Bitcoin is something Satoshi did not discuss in his white paper. As far as I can tell, Satoshi never mentioned the 21-million-bitcoin limit.

If the 21-million-bitcoin meme wasn’t part of the original whitepaper, what was important to Satoshi Nakamoto? Clues abound. But the most obvious one is in the title, which describes Bitcoin as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” In other words, a system for transferring value without financial institutions. Lest anyone miss this point, Satoshi launches his criticism of pre-Bitcoin financial networks by saying that “[c]ommerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties…” Thus, Bitcoin would solve this by “allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” This is the fact that Satoshi wanted to emphasize about his new cypherpunk system.

Bitcoin was intended to be revolutionary, literally a revolt against the need for large financial institutions that required bailouts (see the genesis block) and robbed people of their privacy (page 6 of the white paper). It was intended to be and remain peer-to-peer. For this reason, I suspect that most people have learned the wrong lesson about Bitcoin. It was not intended to reassure holders that they were holding part of a 21-million meme token, but to spur everyday people to forego the long shadow of unresponsive institutions by doing it (value transfer) themselves.

Taking Satoshi’s white paper seriously raises a few questions about what Bitcoin has become today. Here are just a few of these questions: If Bitcoin is largely considered a finished project by its adherents, does the 7 transaction per second limit necessarily mean that most Bitcoin must be transferred on centralized exchanges and financial institutions? What does it mean that Bitcoin was the primary business model of Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi -- each of which required bailouts from FTX or other sources in order to bail out (even partially) the Bitcoin holders of these institutions? What does it mean that there seems to be scant evidence that Bitcoin holders transact directly with each other in bitcoin?