I think the question is less about "can it maintain a (premise of) scarcity" and more "are the scarce tokens worth having?" There's plenty of things that are s

I think the question is less about "can it maintain a (premise of) scarcity" and more "are the scarce tokens worth having?" There's plenty of things that are scarce but essentially worthless. There's no robust secondary market in Penn Central Railroad timetables, the little plastic caps that SNES cartridges came with, or copies of the May 18, 1986 edition of Arizona Republic. Having a built in utility factor is a very strong way to answer the "is it worth having?" question. It provides a stickiness to the asset, rather than just being a pump-and-dump vehicle. Gold says "I'm worth having! I can be made into jewelry and really good connectors for premium audio cables." The paper dollar says "I'm worth having! I can keep the IRS from sending you to jail." Hell, even MMORPG gold says "I'm worth having, because you can trade me for a Sparkly Unicorn Rainbow Dragon of Death mount." Different cryptocurrencies are making a wide range of cases, ranging from "I can let you transfer value cheaply and quickly across borders" to "I can let you buy contraband goods without an obvious paper trail." And a lot of these claims are still to be proven or fully realized. It's entirely possible we're barking up the wrong tree with blockchain. Maybe there's a killer app for it that's not currency, but the current trends seem to be predominantly about it. (It feels like a lot of the supply-chain-tracking and registry-of-ownership hype died down)