[lsd5you]

Yes, but bitcoin is not scarce in any meaningful sense in the long run. Using the same software alternative versions of the coin can be created. Or worse better versions ...

Gold will cease to be meaningfully scarce if we ever mine an asteroid or something like this, but the barriers to that are obviously somewhat higher.

[jay_neyer]

Wrong. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21M bitcoins that will ever exist. I could also create software alternatives of Facebook & Wikipedia, but they would have no value. Network effects are what matter.

[Cthulhu_]

21M with fractions down to 0.00000000001, so while it's fixed it's also fractionable to a very small number.

[aninhumer]

I'm not sure if this is the point you were making, but divisibility doesn't make something less scarce, any more than being able to cut a gold brick into nuggets means gold isn't scarce. A single Bitcoin remains exactly as scarce regardless of how it is divided.

[TYPE_FASTER]

I don't think scarcity necessarily correlates directly to value. Land values are a good example. New land is not getting created, you can subdivide it down to small pieces, yet it's worth more in some areas.

Since Bitcoin is divisible down to a small fraction, and you can trade it for whatever price you'd like, it makes more sense to me for the two parties involved in a Bitcoin transaction to take some tiny fraction of a coin and use that as a token to transfer the value from one party to another. You'd convert fiat -> BTC fraction -> fiat almost immediately.

You would have the benefit of the decentralized network to make completing the transaction much easier, and by using a fraction of a coin you'd remove risk caused by exposure to fluctuations in the value of a whole BTC.

[down]

is scarce, is like a social network, make another facebook, "better technically", no one will care, there is only one bitcoin, its value is in the code as much as facebook value is in react and php.

[jstanley]

"Alternative" bitcoins aren't as good as real bitcoins in the same way that "Alternative" USDs aren't as good as real USDs.

[Udik]

Not true. USD is backed up by a State entity; bitcoin doesn't need one. An alternative USD needs an alternative guarantee of its value, an alternative bitcoin is as safe as the original one.

[Klathmon]

Not quite, since the "backing" of Bitcoin is in it's proof of work, an alternate won't have as much hashpower backing the work, so it won't have as much guarantee.

[Udik]

Good point. I guess that the major bitcoin miners could already derail any emerging competitors with a few intermittent 50% attacks.

[Klathmon]

Every now and then I like to look at the chart at [0] to show just how important this is.

The most prominent "fork" of bitcoin (bitcoin cash) is still only about 45 days away from having their entire history since the fork rewritten using just 25% of the available hashpower.

In a little over a month, they could re-mine every single block since the fork changing which transactions are included. And that's the most popular fork, rewriting the entire chain since the fork. If you want to rewrite just the last 50 or so blocks? You'd need something like a few days and a few percent of the overall hash power to do it.

Are you in possession of like 1% of hashpower? Then it's more than possible for you to send something like 100 BCH to an exchange, wait for the 10 confirmations, then go to work rewriting the chain from that point to "current" without your transaction.

[0] https://fork.lol/security/fork

[andy_ppp]

You are wrong, Bitcoin has a designed in limited number of 20999999.9769 BTC.

[Halian]

Why isn't it a round number of BTC?

[Cthulhu_]

Probably something to do with floating point numbers; https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units has a link to http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sum(210000*floor(50000...),+i%3D0+to+32)%2F10000000, idk what all that means but, 32 bits I guess.