Only 0.003% of the world gained significant wealth from bitcoin.
Financial elites adapt to the Bitcoin revolution to maintain their privilege.
“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything needs to change.”
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Bitcoin gave the people of our time an unprecedented opportunity. An opportunity that did not discriminate based on nationality, sex, race, religion or social class, but that rewarded only those discerning enough to spot and seize the opportunity in time and take the risk.
This had the also unique potential of a distribution of wealth in a large number of hands; the wet dream of any Marxist, socialist or centralized planner. But the passivity of the majority and the action of the minority They are changing everything so that everything remains the same.
The unprecedented opportunity
Never in history has an asset appreciated 100 million times, much less in a period as short as fifteen years. One dollar invested in BTC in 2010 is worth more than $100 million today. One dollar invested in 2011 would already be equivalent to USD 340 thousand. In 2012, at USD 20,000. One dollar. And anyone has access to a dollar.
Each year the appreciation range has been lowering or, in other words, each year the market penalizes those who do not acquire Bitcoin a little more. There is a implicit transfer of value from those who do not buy to those who hold BTC.
In traditional investments like company stocks, appreciation can “create” wealth by reflecting real growth (innovation, profits). But Bitcoin, as a non-productive asset (without cash flowsdividends or intrinsic utility beyond its scarcity and adoption), operates as a zero-sum game: its price depends entirely on the demand of new buyers. Every dollar that a early holder gain in appreciation comes, implicitly, from fresh dollars injected by lagging investors.
The implicit transfer arises from the opportunity cost: nocoiners keep their money in fiat, which loses purchasing power due to inflation. The dollar has lost almost 50% of its purchasing power for the basic basket since 2010, while the euro has lost 40%. Regarding bitcoin, that same dollar lost 10,290,000,000% of its purchasing power in the same 15 years.
If that dollar had stayed in a savings account at 1% compounded annually, it would be worth only ~$1.22. The difference with bitcoin (USD 100M) represents value “transferred” from the fiat system, where the majority of the world stores its wealth, to bitcoiners. This is not a direct subtraction, but amounts to redistribution: Bitcoiners accumulate relative wealth that the rest “lose” through inaction or skepticism.
This unique opportunity was taken advantage of by few people. It can be argued the technological barrier or that the paradigm shift was very profound. But the truth is that few dedicated the time and effort to understand Bitcoin.
According to high net worth residency and citizenship planning firm Henley & Partners, There are only 145,100 bitcoin millionaires, of a world population of 8.2 billion people. If the millionaires for all cryptocurrencies are added, which would add 96 thousand people to the figure, a total of 241,700 millionaires is reached, approximately 0.003% of the world population.
It is common to hear, especially from people with left-wing political leanings, that taxes on the rich should be increased or even that the means of production should be expropriated to redistribute wealth.
While fiat money, through the cantillion effect, has increased the social gap and made the rich richer and the poor poorer, with bitcoin there was a unique opportunity to escape this cycle. Although it is counterfactual history, it is worth asking what would have happened if 30%, 40%, 50% of the world’s population had bought BTC in its first years?
We are not saying with this that it is necessary to have become a millionaire to have participated in this bitcoin wealth transfer. But if we follow Henley’s statistics of total bitcoin users (295 million people), only 3.6% of the world’s population has understood the importance of having BTC by 2025, the year in which the initial revolutionary scenario of Bitcoin seems to be ending.
Bitcoin’s big cat moment
He catpardismor the lampedusian adjective, coined from the novel by the Italian Giuseppe di Lampedusa and from Luchino Visconti’s film, has come to define the cynicism with which the supporters of the Ancien Regime adapted to the inevitable triumph of the bourgeois revolution, using it for their own benefit.
This catfishing is also happening with Bitcoin and the institutions of the legacy system. After years of disdain, repudiation, indifference and skepticism, big capital is now the fiercest accumulators and promoters of Bitcoin.
Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan is probably the most paradigmatic case, for having been the most radical detractor, of the changes in opinion that have occurred recently. But Larry Fink of BlackRock, Michael Saylor of Strategy and, without a doubt, Donald Trump are other notable examples of millionaires who despised Bitcoin and today have completely changed their discourse.
It is evident that they realized that, in order to maintain their privileges in the monetary system to come, they must accommodate themselves to it, instead of continuing to row against the tide. Change everything so that nothing changes. It is logical, rational, human nature; nothing condemnable about it.
What is a problem, or rather a pity, is that the disdain, indifference and skepticism of the retail nocoiners ends up leading to the largest transfer of wealth in history remaining in the same hands.
It is already happening that the first holders, those visionaries who trusted in the promise of Bitcoin, in its founding principles and in its transformative potential, are taking profits, selling their holdings to big capital.
Although we could problematize what it means to “take profits” when they are exchanging bitcoin, the most appreciated asset in history, for inflationary fiat (even more so now that the market has loans collateralized with bitcoin); and although we could also doubt that these whales understood the long-term game of bitcoin or if this is a protest or sign of disappointment, the reality is that they are selling. AND They are selling like never before:
This change of hands is what the analyst Jordi Visser has called The silent Bitcoin IPO. While Bitcoin is not a company that can go public, a time in traditional finance in which the first shareholders sell, while a new cohort of investors takes the torch, in the case of Bitcoin this event is being experienced organically, simply due to a change in mentality among the financial elites.
Although Visser observes it as a maturation of the asset that will lead it to a more stable price, we can also see it as a symptom of the co-option of Bitcoin by the traditional world. But from the perspective of the nocoiner, or at this point it is better to call it precoiner, it also means an increase in the opportunity cost of delaying your entry into bitcoin.
We are not saying this because the price of bitcoin is going to stop rising. Considering that only 3% of the world’s population currently owns the money of the future, the margin for growth remains quite high. But the voracity with which the institutions, companies and countries of the world are beginning to demand it is dizzying, and it is just beginning. As we said before, it is logical, rational and natural.
Marxists and collectivists who criticize Bitcoin’s ‘elitist control’ are partly right, but they miss the elephant in the room: their own inaction, and our collective inaction, paved this path.
But It is not too late to break the Gatopardist cycle. Bitcoin is not an exclusive club; its limited supply of 21 million still awaits global demand. For today’s precoiner—those who hesitate out of fear or ignorance—the margin for growth persists: with only 3.6% adoption, the price will continue to rise. But the competition is no longer against peers, but against titans.
The lesson of Lampedusa is not resignation, but urgency: if we want everything to change, we must act now. Educate a friend, accumulate satoshis. Only then will the greatest transfer of wealth in history flow not into the same hands, but into those forging a decentralized future.
The first wave of Bitcoin was pioneers; the second will be about institutions. But there may still be a third: that of individuals who understand that sovereignty is not delegated, it is exercised.