Not because they can't.
But because they won’t - cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally
how IQ, time preference, and wealth concentration are forming a brutal flywheel that almost nobody is ready for.
By the time you understand it, the harvest will already be over.
Bitcoin is not hard to buy.
It’s hard to hold.
It’s hard to understand.
It’s hard to survive.
Because Bitcoin doesn’t just require money -
It requires cognitive bandwidth and time preference discipline that most humans simply do not possess.
Bitcoin is the first asset in history that acts as a cognitive sieve, separating the patient from the impulsive, the disciplined from the weak, and the intelligent from the confused.
The data is ruthless:
IQ ↑ → Patience ↑ → Savings ↑ → Wealth ↑
• Each IQ point = ~$234–$616 more income per year
• Each 10 IQ points = ~2–4% higher national savings rates
• Over decades: exponential wealth divergence
Small brain differences → massive asset divergence.
Bitcoin filters people through 3 brutal gates:
1️⃣ Abstract reasoning (21M supply cap, halvings, digital scarcity)
2️⃣ Emotional control (80% drawdowns)
3️⃣ Self-custody & security models (seed phrases, multisig, protocol layers)
Most fail one of these before even starting.
Surveys already prove it:
• Only 5% of U.S. adults are “very confident” using crypto.
Translation: 95% are cognitively unprepared for Bitcoin.
The majority simply don't have the intellectual or emotional hardware
Meanwhile, the whales quietly accumulate:
• Top 97 wallets: ~3M BTC (~14% of supply)
• U.S. ETFs: ~935k BTC (~4.5% of supply)
• Corporate treasuries (MSTR, Tesla, Metaplanet):
~1.1M BTC (~5.2%)
• Governments: ~464k BTC (~2.3%)
~26% is now in permanent diamond hands.
Bitcoin doesn’t redistribute wealth.
Bitcoin redistributes IQ and time preference.
Each crash bleeds coins from the impatient and cognitively unqualified into the hands of the most disciplined entities on Earth:
Sovereigns, corporations, ETFs, and high-IQ whales.
This is Pareto principle on nuclear steroids.
Every bear market drives further concentration.
Every capitulation hands another chunk of the 21M fixed supply to entities that never sell.
The long tail is being harvested, over and over again.
It gets darker.
Low-IQ, high-time-preference people don’t just lose Bitcoin.
They rent it back from those who bought earlier:
• ETF management fees
• Derivatives premiums
• Exchange spreads
• Custodial markups
Bitcoin becomes the ultimate wealth-extraction machine.
The ceiling is real:
• Below ~1 standard deviation IQ, most people simply cannot build the mental model to fully “get” Bitcoin.
• Behavioral drag + custodial friction bleeds them dry.
The smartest engineer the system.
Everyone else pays to use it.
Unless:
• Education massively scales
• UX becomes idiot-proof
• Cultural capital teaches discipline
…the long tail of humanity will spend the next century renting Bitcoin exposure from the entities who front-ran them.
Bitcoin is the purest cognitive sieve ever engineered.
It rewards:
• High abstract reasoning
• Emotional resilience
• Long time horizons
• Low discount rates
It punishes:
• Low cognitive bandwidth
• Volatility intolerance
• Immediate gratification
In 2040, most of the 21M Bitcoin will be locked in:
• Institutional ETFs
• Sovereign wealth funds
• Corporate treasuries
• Multigenerational family offices
The remaining 99% will be customers, renting exposure forever.
The harvest has already begun.
Study Austrian economics
• Master self-custody
• Build generational scaffolding
• Survive volatility
• Front-run the consolidation
Because the next harvest cycle will be even more brutal.