Spoiler: Because it is based on the liquidity indicators of the bitcoin market in the past years and months. And the situation in 2020 began to change dramatically.
At the beginning of 2020, the amount of liquid bitcoins was higher then the amount of non-liquid ones. The non-liquid bitcoins are the Bitcoins of hodlers and whales that have not left their cold wallets for years. It also includes the forever lost bitcoins, which, according to Glassnode, are over 3 million. The total amount of none-liquid bitcoins is now 14.5 million.
Liquid Bitcoins are divided into two classes:
Liquid coins. These are those bitcoins that have never been withdrawn from a wallet in the amount of more than 25% of the deposit. Thus, they can be called conditionally liquid, and there is a 50% chance that they can be sold if suitable conditions arise for this. There were only 1.2 million such liquid assets at the beginning of the year.
And the last class of BTC: Highly liquid found. These coins are available for purchase by everyone at crypto exchanges. At the end of the year, there were only 3 million of such highly liquid products.
Thus, all private investors, funds, companies, in theory, could only count on 4.2 million bitcoins, or only 22% of all available bitcoins, since there are actually no more bitcoins on the market.
Starting March 2020, the number of none-liquid, unavailable, bitcoins grew, while the number of liquid ones fell. As a result, in 12 months more than 1.2 million bitcoins became non-liquid.
But the most important thing is that only in the first three months of 2021, another million bitcoins passed into the category of non-luqid ones, which means that bitcoins in free circulation are at their historical minimum in the entire history of bitcoin, starting from the moment of the first trading on the infamous MTGox exchange.
