00 — Cold open · Est. reading time: cheaper than holding cash
How many dollars exist?
US M2 money supply · live estimate
≈ +$30,000 every second
source: Federal Reserve H.6
Nobody knows exactly — not even the people making them. This is the best official guess, and it moves too fast to read. Below it, one other number is watching. That one hasn’t moved since 2009.
Scroll — it keeps going ↓
01 — The printing years1971 → today · scroll to advance
AUG 1971President Nixon “temporarily” suspends the dollar’s link to gold. The temporary part is going great.
×1.00consumer prices since 1971
US dollars in circulation — M2, estimated
The shrinking grocery bag 🛍$100 · 1971 prices
Your 1971 $100 still buys
measured in 1971 groceries · CPI-U
Interlude — a rounding error the size of a decadeM2, Jan 2020 → today
Roughly a third of every dollar in existence was created after 2020. Your savings didn’t shrink. The ruler did.
US M2: $15.3 trillion in Jan 2020 → ≈ $22.6 trillion today. No vote was held. No permission was asked. You were, however, thanked for your patience.
02 — The pictureFig. 1 · 1971 → 2040
Two ways to run a money.
US M2 money supply vs. bitcoin in circulation. Styled after the Swiss, who at least respected their franc. Dashed segments are projections; the cap is not.
US M2 money supply ($T)
Bitcoin in circulation (M)
Projected
- 1AUG 1971Nixon ends the dollar’s gold convertibility, “temporarily.” Money becomes a promise with no collateral — and promises got cheap.
- 2OCT 2008Banks break the world; the printer warms up to fix it. Nine days later, a nine-page whitepaper quietly proposes an alternative.
- 3MAR 2020$3 trillion in three months. “We’re not even thinking about thinking about raising rates.” The chart needed a bigger axis.
One of these lines is a policy — revisable at 2 a.m. in a crisis, by people you’ll never meet. The other is a promise, checked by tens of thousands of computers every ten minutes, forever. That’s the whole chart.
03 — Now count theseHard cap · set 2009 · expires never
Some numbers don’t move.
21,000,000
That’s every bitcoin there will ever be. No emergency meeting can raise it. No chairman can “adjust” it. It was carved into code in 2009, and it will still be true in 2140 when the last sliver is mined. Try getting that in writing from a central bank.
Mined so far
live estimate · +3.125 BTC / block
Still to mine
—
stretched over the next ~114 years
New supply per day
≈ 450 BTC
and falling — it halves every 4 years
Printable beyond the cap
0.00000000
not zero-ish. zero.
For scale: the dollar supply crossed $21 trillion in late 2021 — Bitcoin’s entire cap, a million times over. The universe has a sense of humor. The Fed does not.
04 — The promiseThe empowering part
Scarcity isn’t a bug. It’s the first honest promise money ever made.
You can’t unplug the printer. But you don’t have to store your life’s work in its output tray. Twenty-one million is a small number — that’s the whole point — and there is still time to understand it.
Learn the keys. Hold your own. Opt out sweetly. Start where we did: Bad Wallet — our non-custodial wallet and learning hub. Bitcoin, Absolutely Decentralized. 🔑
Next supply cut — estimatedblock 1,050,000
days:
hrs:
min:
sec
Reward falls to 1.5625 BTC · nobody gets to postpone it · no exceptions for emergencies, elections, or vibes
Sour Labs — sweet tools, sour to the system. 🍋