Lesson 2 The scarcity of scarcity

 

In general, the advance of technology seems to make things more abundant. More and more people are able to enjoy what previously have been luxurious goods. Soon, we will all live like kings. Most of us already do. As Peter Diamandis wrote in Abundance: “Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”

Bitcoin, an advanced technology in itself, breaks this trend and creates a new commodity which is truly scarce. Some even argue that it is one of the scarcest things in the universe. The supply can’t be inflated, no matter how much effort one chooses to expend towards creating more.

“Only two things are genuinely scarce: time and bitcoin.”Saifedean Ammous

Paradoxically, it does so by a mechanism of copying. Transactions are broadcast, blocks are propagated, the distributed ledger is — well, you guessed it — distributed. All of these are just fancy words for copying. Heck, Bitcoin even copies itself onto as many computers as it can, by incentivizing individual people to run full nodes and mine new blocks.

All of this duplication wonderfully works together in a concerted effort to produce scarcity.

In a time of abundance, Bitcoin taught me what real scarcity is.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

Modeling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity by PlanB

Bitcoin Can’t Be Copied by Parker Lewis

Presentation on The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous

🎧 Misir Mahmudov on the Scarcity of Time and Bitcoin
TFTC#60 hosted by Marty Bent

🎧 BTCDCA on Dollar Cost Averaging Bitcoin
BEC#20 hosted by Collin

🎧 Misir Mahmudov on Bitcoin as Stored Time
OTC#126 hosted by Pomp

🎧 Hass McCook on the importance of Auto-DCA
SLP#288 hosted by Stephan Livera

📚 Abundance - The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis

📚 The Bitcoin Standard - The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous