Bankless · Monday, July 13, 2026
Dan Held posits that Satoshi Nakamoto made significant mistakes with Bitcoin, specifically regarding its unit bias and aggressive early issuance schedule. He argues that a lower unit price (e.g., $65 instead of $65,000) might have fostered wider adoption, and a flatter issuance curve could have extended the security budget longer.
“And then he also had a very aggressive issuance schedule, you know, like to produce that many Bitcoin in the beginning. It was very aggressive. It could have been a much flatter trajectory.”
“So, yeah, I definitely agree with that. Yeah. And you and I have talked about this extensively, but yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, outside of the security budget, I'll talk about the security budget in a second, but just like, yeah, just like having like so many coins be mined so early. Like imagine how you could have just stretched the security budget like four times, 10 times further.”
“So, you know, I think Satoshi did make a mistake on that, where he put the decimal. You think Bitcoin should be like $65? Yeah. I mean, you probably would have got a more adoption, but maybe you wouldn't have. We don't know. We can't replay time. Yeah.”