hello everybody Welcome to bitcoin not crypto my name is Forest Stevens in today's video I'm going to be talking about the controversial little asterisk at the end of black Rock's videos and at the bottom of their investor perspectives of um ibit which says that the 21 million Supply cap of Bitcoin is not guaranteed but before I do that I'm going to tell you about the best way to buy Bitcoin which is not through one of these custodial ETFs and it is to buy it in self- custody which is what I do and I do it
through Bitcoin well which is a non-custodial platform which means when you send the money they send you Bitcoin directly to Cold Storage into your Hardware wallet which eliminates the risk of third party and just is just a much more efficient way and they do this at the lowest spreads so that means you get more Bitcoin for less money and they also have some bonus reward point system that they do and you can actually get yourself some free Bitcoin by using my link in the description or if you're the first one to scan this QR code
with your lightning wallet you can get some Bitcoin as well so use my link in the description or my code Bitcoin not crypto and get yourself some Bitcoin into Cold Storage today so the 21 million uh Supply cap of Bitcoin is an incredibly important aspect of what Bitcoin is I think this is why an institution as big as Black Rock one that's acquired as much Bitcoin as Black Rock as although it's custodial um and the the ownership is I mean they hold it for basically the investors that buy it through the ETF I think uh
you know this has raised a lot of red flags a lot of um basically concern from people who really value the proposition of there only being 21 million Bitcoin the reason it's so valuable for there only to be 21 million uh Supply cap is that is in part um part of what makes Bitcoin basically deflationary and it makes it so that uh there's no basically ability to debase uh the currency there's no ability to dilute current holders of that currency by issuing more right there's a fixed Supply this is combined with the um the use
of the proof of work with which uh is how new coins are minted into existence or unlocked out of time um but this is combined with basically that 21 million and that 21 M million is written into code now Bitcoin is open source so somebody could take the code right copy and paste download the code of uh Bitcoin and in there is 21 million um Supply and you could literally change that to 22 and you could issue that software now if you did that nothing would happen nothing would happen to the original Bitcoin and in
fact you would have to then incentivize a a bunch of nodes a bunch of Miners and a bunch of holders to adopt your new software now why would they do that uh when they have Bitcoin that has 21 why would they adopt something that dilutes them right why what would be the incentive of that so the market participants in the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin have no incentive to increase the supply when they are holders of Bitcoin themselves so who are the market participants well you and I that hold Bitcoin we are Market participants we are
part of the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin right we don't want to go over to Black Rock BTC which is uh you know supposed for this case a a Bitcoin hard Fork um that black rock creates that has 42 million right of Supply we don't want to go over to that because we don't trust it and it's different than our Bitcoin right if if there's going to be a Max Supply increase it is a completely incompatible thing with what Bitcoin is today right it it creates what was known as a hard Fork which is a big
enough change to make it backwards incompatible basically the other reason that uh you know you wouldn't want to change something like this is because the 21 million Supply is a lot of the reason that people get into this it was definitely one of the reasons that I started buying Bitcoin was because I started to understand oh they they can't make more than this there's 21 million which is the only thing in existence that we know of that has a true limited Supply we have no idea how much gold there is in the universe right gold
is the next best comparison to bitcoin and you can say okay well what about cardano or what about any of these other uh cryptos that have a Max Supply the thing is is those are just rapidly developing those are technology that are constantly being changed and who knows if one of those things will change the supply it is so much more difficult to change the supply of Bitcoin and that's why I believe it's the only one out of all these cryptos that actually has a true limited Supply is because it cannot be changed as opposed
to these other ones that definitely could be changed because they have a charismatic leader or they're very centralized or uh you know there's different incentive structures basically because of the consensus mechanisms that they have the fixed supply of 21 million is part of the numberg go up technology we understand that the currency can't get debased so baked into that is the only possibility in the long run that the value of it's going to go up as long as it stays uh useful in the way that it is which the way that it's useful is value
transfer instantly over time and it's completely trustworthy and um you know the uh the miners and nodes all agree that you own something and that somebody else owns something right this is this is an extremely valuable thing in uh the world that we live in ownership trust value transfer these are incredibly useful tools so the consensus mechanisms of Bitcoin uh can be broken down into people who own Bitcoin uh miners that mine Bitcoin that profit from Bitcoin people who run Bitcoin software which is as simple as downloading like say Bitcoin core uh developers and um
Bitcoin connected companies companies that make their profits from Bitcoin so all these people are directly connected to bitcoin and I would say even Bitcoin connected companies I I would put Black Rock in there now right black rock is making a huge amount of Fiat money off of the assets under management of ibet so his Fidelity so all these other issuers of these ETFs they're making a lot of money from these ETFs and they benefit from Bitcoin being secure and being unchanged in the 21 million Supply cap if something happens right we we all got into
this in part because of number go up and that number go up is in part because of the 21 million Supply if something threatens that then number go down because it is no longer the has the value proposition that we all got into it for so all of these these people you know people that own Bitcoin miners people that that run Bitcoin software the developers that work on bitcoin and Bitcoin connected companies all of those people uh all of those things get hurt by Bitcoin changing its Max Supply and those are the people that control
the software and run the software and participate in the network that is Bitcoin so none of them want to change it none of them want to operate and and uh on a different network and we can actually see a very clear example of this in 2017 in 2017 there was an attempt to change Bitcoin in a very fundamental way it wasn't about the max Supply but it was about the block size and there was a an attempt with uh Bitcoin XT which had a much bigger block and a future of of increasing that block size
they got a huge amount of uh big Bitcoin miners on board um but basically the nodes and all the other people all the other consensus mechanisms in Bitcoin were not on board so Bitcoin XT failed Bitcoin cash took that and uh created this other cryptocurrency that was a hard Fork of Bitcoin and when they did that everyone that had Bitcoin got the equivalent of Bitcoin cash and you can see that this hard Fork did not work this was another example big miners big uh influential people within Bitcoin were a part of Bitcoin cash and the
other hard Forks that happened from Bitcoin cash and the when everybody else got these Bitcoin cash coins they sold them they just sold them and bought more Bitcoin and that's because they didn't believe in this even though big companies and big miners were behind this it wasn't what Bitcoin was and it is a the the block size Wars are a very good example of how this would turn out for Black Rock right Bitcoin cash uh when you price it in Bitcoin has fallen like 90 something perc like it's it's ultimately a failure as a project
um and uh you know the market has decided that Bitcoin or Bitcoin core as as bcers call it has one right um Bitcoin has one against Bitcoin cash that is an absolute truth so because of this right if if there was going to be a Max Supply cap change this wouldn't happen to all existing node operators and miners of Bitcoin it would be a hardfork it would be a a software change that all of these Miners and nodes and everybody within the consensus mechanisms would have to agree to adopt and if they didn't they would
just adopt the older version of Bitcoin which is the current version of Bitcoin and they would be allotted all of these coins with a different market cap right maybe it's infinite maybe it's the 42 that I mentioned before as an example and what they would do is they would do the exact same thing that they did with the hard Fork of Bitcoin cash they would take those free coins that they were basically aird dropped for holding Bitcoin and they would sell it they would sell it in the open market and buy more Bitcoin this would
be a creative for actual Bitcoin holders if there was a Max supply chain because it would not affect the actual Bitcoin code that still exists that would still exist then anybody running Bitcoin core would have that and the alternate hard Fork uh Black Rock BTC would have some value uh attributed to it right there would be some market for it to some degree especially initially because people would think oh well black Rock's such so big everybody's got to go with them they hold so much coins this doesn't really matter if if it's not what Bitcoin
is it's not what Bitcoin is if the value proposition is there the 21 Supply 21 million Supply cap is such an integral part of the value proposition of what Bitcoin is if that changes there's going to be hard fork and that that hard Fork does not have that value proposition bu built into it and therefore it's less valuable now people would just literally do what they did with Bitcoin cash they would take those black rock BTC they would sell it to whoever is willing to buy that crap and they would buy actual Bitcoin for it
that's what would happen uh I don't see this as being likely I don't think that black rock has some crazy plan of doing this I don't think um I don't think it would work out for them actually I think a lot of people would start pulling their money out of the assets under management of ibit they would maybe buy some other ETF if they had to or hopefully put it into cold storage and hold Bitcoins elv which is the most valuable thing you can do with Bitcoin but I don't know you know like I I
don't think that they're looking to do that I think this is literally just like a legal thing that they need to do because it technically is not a guarantee right it's a 99.999999% probability but because of that they still need to have like some legal jargon at the end that says that it's not a guarantee and the other thing is too is they can't guarantee it because they don't control it they don't control Bitcoin right it's in the hands of all of this cons consensus mechanism that I've already mentioned so of course they cannot guarantee
it because they have no power over it so that's really just as simple as it is so if you want to get yourself some some actual cold cold storage Bitcoin if you don't want Black Rock holding it check out Bitcoin well it goes to support this show when you sign up so I appreciate you all for doing that and if you felt like I missed something here if I explained something uh confusing to you if you wanted some more clarification comment your questions in the comment section on YouTube I'll be sure to address them there
or in a future video and I'll see you on the next one
