[ericb]

> You can't "fork" a scarce resource.

A fork gets you nothing on the original chain, just like inventing "new dollars" gets you nothing except what the market decides "new dollars" are worth. Digital scarcity is still there. If I have an item on that blockchain, you can't take it from me by forking. The only way to "move" that asset would be to get my private key. Forks are an anomaly the market is still figuring out.

> Of course an automated finance bot needs a server, it's just a distributed and computationally expensive one instead of a centralized one that costs pennies to operate

This misses the point. If I want to make a trading bot, I have to find a host, initiate a business relationship with them, and keep it running and highly available. If I make an ethereum smart contract, I set and forget. If I want people to interact with my bot and know it's source code, I can do that on ethereum. Is there another way you can think of to do this and have the bot be transparent--in other words a guarantee that the source code you looked at is actually the source code you're interacting with?

> The OpSec that goes into "being your own bank" is not worth the cost to the overwhelming majority of people.

This is only true until people notice the deflation. The ability to convert electricity to money that doesn't automatically shrink (even if it is not ready-cash) is very valuable in places where it is shrinking quickly.

[lavrov]

Forks aren't as simple as you might think - who gets to determine what the "original chain" is in the event of a fork? Suppose that ETH forked and one version changed some consensus rules to increase the supply of currency, and Vitalik, the Ethereum Foundation, all of the miners/stakers, and users moved to that chain - wouldn't that be ETH? But it would violate the principle of fixed digital scarcity.

Confiscation of assets is obviously possible via forks as well, but the fact that someone can't take your money without your private key doesn't relate to scarcity.

[bordercases]

> digitally scarcity

As long as crypto is pegged to a fiat currency like USD then the scarcity effect is going to be destroyed by speculative valuations.

USD isn't going to stop being fiat because it's too useful for it to be fiat when doing market regulation.

USD might stop being standard currency, but I expect other countries are going to maintain fiat standards because being able to vary the nominal amount of money supply is a better policy tool than merely controlling gold, because it opens up another theater of war beyond maintaining hard power.