Belief in future value is often one of the most powerful drivers of demand. Bitcoin has no cash flow, no staking rewards, nothing. It just has the belief that it could be a long term store of value to rival gold. Or more ambitious beliefs like definancialization and hyper-bitcoinization. But it’s all beliefs at the end of the day.

On the supply side, a token will increase in value if fewer of those tokens exist—we call that deflation. A token will decrease in value if more of them exist—that’s inflation. When you’re evaluating the supply side you don’t have to worry about things like whether the token has any utility, or whether it will generate income for its holders.... See more

Some tokens allow you to tap into the earnings of the protocol they represent. If you hold SUSHI, you can stake it to earn a share of the Sushi protocol revenues, currently for about a 10.5% APR.

That means 90% of the supply is already in circulation, and here will only be 10.5% more bitcoin 100 years from now, so you shouldn’t expect any serious inflationary pressure bringing down the value of the coin. 

Let’s start on the supply side since it’s a little easier to understand. The main thing you’re trying to figure out is:

There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin, and they’re released at a rate that gets cut in half every four years or so. Roughly 19,000,000 already exist, so there are only 2,000,000 more to be released over the next 120 years.

And the question to keep in the back of your mind isn’t necessarily “will this appreciate against the dollar?” but “Will this appreciate against (BTC, ETH, SOL, whatever you prefer)”. Most crypto assets are highly correlated and move together, and if you’re holding anything besides the big foundational coins, it should be based on some belief that... See more

By reading the docs or whitepaper, you should get a good sense of how the supply is going to be managed, and what forces will drive demand for the token or cryptocurrency.

What about Ethereum? The circulating supply is around 118,000,000, and there’s no cap on how many Ether can exist. But Ethereum’s net emissions were recently adjusted via a burn mechanism so that it would reach a stable supply, or potentially even be deflationary, resulting in somewhere between 100-120m tokens total. Given that, we shouldn’t expect... See more