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It's not really scarce though because you can divide up bitcoins into tiny pieces. It's more of a mental scarcity.
by theklub 9y ago
It's not really scarce though because you can divide up bitcoins into tiny pieces. It's more of a mental scarcity.
- xendo 9y agoDividing is not same as 'printing' for regular currencies. It won't drive the inflation.
- asafira 9y agoI don't think that means it isn't scarce: if there was a supply of water (and you could buy it in any amount) and people were buying it up and selling it on a secondary market, it would still cause the price to go up.
- nonsince 9y agoYes, but that still means that the price _per bitcoin_ will keep increasing.
- theklub 9y agoThat's fine, I'm not talking about the price. I just mean its not really scarce when you can divide it up so much and trade it. The scarcity is fake. It's like saying there is only 10 trillion dollars in a bank so the trillions are scarce if I'm only going to trade 1 trillion at a time.
- appleflaxen 9y agoi don't understand your reasoning. it seems like you're saying potato chips aren't scarce, because I can break the chips in my bag up until everyone in the world has a piece of potato chip, and thereby feed the world. in economic terms, scarcity means that the supply is fixed. and bitcoin supply, by definition and network consensus, is fixed.
- oulrich 9y agoPotato chips have some intrinsic utility. Coins (digital or otherwise) generally do not. I think this is what makes 'breaking up potato chips' into a million pieces to solve hunger seem ridiculous. Where-as splitting a coin into values seems natural. To me at least.
- anm89 9y agoYou are misunderstanding the term scarcity in the economic sense. The ability to acquire some limited quantity of the thing isn't sufficient. If you cannot easily acquire an arbitrary quantity that you desire than a good has some element of scarcity.