I want to show you some data on how little Internet Computer there is relative to Bitcoin, because it genuinely blew my mind when I saw it for the first time. When I put together what it means, I knew I wanted to share it. Right now everybody thinks Bitcoin is so scarce, like they need to grab some up before it's all gone. But when I look at the data, right now there's 540 times as much Bitcoin, in terms of purchasing power, as there is Internet Computer Protocol. And that's like, whoa. So let me walk through the numbers. I found this yesterday talking to Zero to Hero in one of my crypto interviews.
How much Bitcoin is actually sitting on exchanges
The first thing I do is look at how much Bitcoin is on exchanges and calculate how much purchasing power it would take, at the current market price, to buy all of it. At the beginning of 2024, there were about 2.6 million Bitcoin on exchanges. Right now it's down to about 2.35 million Bitcoin on exchanges, which is more than 10% of the entire Bitcoin supply sitting directly on exchanges.
If you take 2.34 million Bitcoin times $90,000 per Bitcoin, that's how you get your purchasing power, and it comes out to roughly 200 or so billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. That's just what's tracked directly on Glassnode from Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, and so on. This is only the data that's on Glassnode. There could be other ways to look at it, and you can never have absolute confidence that the data you're looking at is perfect, but you can see the clear overall picture. Right now there's more than 10% of the whole Bitcoin supply sitting on exchanges, which is hundreds of billions of dollars, if you wanted to buy all of it.
Why I compare everything to Internet Computer Protocol
Now let's compare that to Internet Computer Protocol. If I were you and I hadn't heard of Internet Computer Protocol, I'd ask, well, why compare to Internet Computer Protocol instead of something else? My answer is that, in my opinion, Internet Computer Protocol has the most advanced technology in crypto. My own website is hosted directly on the blockchain, and I'm not aware of another way to do this. I'm not aware of any other blockchain that is a full-stack platform, where you can build entire applications like OpenChat, which is an application similar to Discord or Telegram. I'm not aware of another way you can build something like that with any other technology in the world right now on blockchain. It's secured without any firewalls. To me, Internet Computer Protocol is the absolute most advanced tech in crypto by far. I've done a lot of videos about that, which is why I'm comparing with it, and it's where I've put all my money.
The market valuation of ICP, when I look at it on blockchaincenter.net, looks crazy low to me right now for what the technology can do. The fact that something like OpenChat is able to run fully on chain, the website, the front end, the back end, and all the crypto, all the different coins, everything happening fully on chain with this reverse gas fee model, is why I'm comparing it to ICP and not something else. I'm looking, as an investor, for something I believe is undervalued.
One reason I think ICP is so scarce compared to Bitcoin is that it's so expensive relative to its market cap, because it only has about a $4.2 billion market cap. Compared to what I believe the tech can do, this is by far the most advanced tech in crypto, and my opinion is that it'll be valued accurately one day, in the top three. So if you look at Bitcoin's market cap, 10% of that is hundreds of billions of dollars sitting on exchanges.
How little ICP is actually available to buy
Now, if you go over to ICP on icterminal.com and look at the exchange balance, right now there's only about 45 million Internet Computer Protocol on exchanges, according to IC Terminal. That's less than 10% of all the Internet Computer Protocol sitting on exchanges. But compared to the market cap, that's only $400 million or so of what I consider the most advanced technology in crypto and blockchain, something that's been running for three years now. There's only a few hundred million dollars sitting on exchanges.
If you then do the math, that means there's about 500-plus times as much buying power available for Bitcoin as there is for Internet Computer. That means if buying were equal, and for every person who put $1 into Internet Computer Protocol, people put $540 into Bitcoin, then all other things would be equal. But does that make sense to me? Absolutely not. Yes, there's probably a hundred times as much talk about Bitcoin as Internet Computer Protocol, but I'm more interested in where the future is going. Right now Bitcoin definitely can get bigger, but how much bigger is it going to get? At this point, so many people already know about Bitcoin that it's limited, because so much of the masses have already heard of it. People have already bought it.
The technology in Internet Computer Protocol is definitely not 500 times less interesting than Bitcoin. In fact, the best way I see right now to scale Bitcoin is to use Internet Computer Protocol's layer two with chain-key Bitcoin. Developers are desperate for an alternative to wrapped Bitcoin, and Internet Computer has it. So right now Bitcoin is actually 540 times more abundant in terms of your spending power. It almost feels designed to make you take your dollars out of the bank and plow them into Bitcoin. To me, given what I've said about the technology, and given the things I've seen building on it like OpenChat, which I use every day, Internet Computer Protocol is where I want to be. I keep all of these conversations going in my ICP Crypto playlist if you want to go deeper on why.
Why the other blockchains don't change the picture
As for other blockchains, to me it doesn't matter what their purchasing power is. It doesn't matter, because their technology is basically just copied from Ethereum and Bitcoin. They've done the minimum effort to get their own blockchain, but in my opinion the tech is not going to last the test of time. It's essentially competitive with almost everything else out there. You have things like Bitcoin SV, which are blatantly a fork of Bitcoin. Copies of copies, and things that are very similar, are generally not going to last the test of time in my view, which is why for those other ones, it doesn't matter if the supply is effectively smaller. The question I care about is which one of these is going to go nuts in the future.
Here's another thing about Bitcoin: you don't have anything burning on Bitcoin. Yes, you do have people losing their Bitcoin, and you do have Bitcoin mining adding to a supply that's already full of Bitcoin. However, Internet Computer can actually become deflationary, because it is a world computer. Right now, the amount of burn on Internet Computer, which you can see on IC Terminal, has recently started surging. In the entire history of the Internet Computer network, there was only 172,000 ICP burned in the first three years. In the last two months, we've now tripled that, with almost 500,000 ICP being burned.
Where is that ICP going to come from? A lot of it is going to be pulled off of exchanges to be burned. Now, ICP actually has a significantly higher balance loaded onto exchanges over the last six months compared to Bitcoin, and that's because a lot of people just don't know about it yet. But think about how many people knew about Bitcoin in 2012. That was years before I found it. ICP has now been around just about three years. So in terms of where Bitcoin was in 2012, I think ICP is barely getting warmed up. This is the same kind of purchasing-power gap I dug into when I showed how 21 Bitcoin in 2014 is 550 ICP today.
Bitcoin has never been less scarce, in dollar terms
The time to be in Bitcoin, in my opinion, was 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. Now I think it's too late. Everybody who's in Bitcoin today, look at this purchasing power. My honest take is that your dollars are not going to go that far in Bitcoin, because there's so much purchasing power, there's so much Bitcoin. To me it's not scarce at all. The videos that have been talking about how scarce Bitcoin is are, in my view, wrong. There are hundreds of millions, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of Bitcoin you can buy right now.
There has never been as much Bitcoin, in terms of US dollars that you could buy on exchanges, ever. Even when you had greater supplies of Bitcoin, like earlier this year, the price was a fraction of what it is now, so there wasn't as much raw dollar value of Bitcoin you could buy on exchanges. Now, with the price at $90,000, even though there's technically less Bitcoin on exchanges, the price is so high that there's effectively more of it to buy. Less scarcity, more of it. Once the price goes up on ICP, this same thing will happen. But right now, this is the craziest data I've seen. Right now ICP is 540 times less available, which to me makes it 540 times easier for ICP to pump at this point than Bitcoin.
There's a lot of hype and attention on Bitcoin. But the more people get into Bitcoin, the more you've got people who are already in and all excited about it. After I got into Bitcoin, it took a little while, but I then started thinking, okay, Bitcoin's really cool, but what's better than Bitcoin? What's the next Bitcoin? Especially when something like Bitcoin starts to dump after you buy it, you start to think, well, is there something better, maybe I can get my money back. And this is how altcoin seasons happen. When Bitcoin pumps and people think it's at its peak, they start to go look for something better. Even a tiny amount of money flowing into ICP, in my opinion, is going to make it absolutely shoot up.
Yes, for those of us who have been in it for a year and watched the price against Bitcoin actually stay the same or dump for most of the time, sure, it hasn't looked so good in the short term. But in the long term, my belief is that one day this is going to look like a total fantasy, and you'll be like, I can't believe you could buy 10,000 Internet Computer Protocol with a single Bitcoin. That's insane. Just like some of you now might think it's crazy that one day I bought a whole Bitcoin for $170. It seems nuts today, doesn't it, when Bitcoin is at $90,000. But ICP, to me, is unlike everything else out there. If you want to talk any of this through with me directly, you can join me and ask me anything.
What you can actually do with ICP today
I got so excited about this statistic that I had to share it. One more thing I love about ICP is that you can use it totally for free. With Bitcoin, I'm not aware of anything you can actually do with it that doesn't involve paying fees. You can buy it on an exchange, but you're not technically using the blockchain most of the time when you're buying Bitcoin on an exchange. They're holding it. And if you're buying it on an exchange, you're not even using the blockchain at all. You don't even know if you have real Bitcoin until you try to take it off the exchange. With ICP, you can go to OpenChat and really start using the technology totally for free.
This is the kind of supply math that, to me, completely flips the usual story about which coin is scarce, and I went even deeper on the appraisal side of it in why crypto market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real. None of this is financial advice; it's just how I personally see the data and where I'm putting my own money.