[unhashable]

Miners block rewards will be reduced in half from 12.24 BTC to 6.12. In theory this reduces overall sell pressure on BTC in a key time when Bitcoin's narrative is maturing and adoption is moving forward with institutions.

When Central Banks throughout the world are printing unlimited fiat, there is no better time to hold the universe's scarcest asset.

[krustyburger]

Calling Bitcoin the universe’s scarcest asset is laughable. Leaving aside the hyperbole of invoking the “universe” to rank the scarcity of something terrestrial, there are many conventional assets that are scarcer than Bitcoin, like Picasso paintings or mansions in Bel Air. Lastly, Bitcoin is not even the” scarcest” cryptocurrency.

Even if you stand to gain if Bitcoin’s price increases, you should not be trying to generate hype for it here on HN.

[leorio]

scarcity is determined by demand not supply.

[krustyburger]

It is literally the difference between supply and demand and is determined by both.

[leorio]

Scarcity falls into three distinctive categories: demand-induced, supply-induced, and structural.

For money, scarcity is demand induced. For cryptocurrency/money the number 21m or 100m does not matter as long as it's divisible.

For something like paintings, scarcity is supply induced.

[lgl]

This! Also ironic that the currency that would ideologically only bring benefits to the unbanked is now largely held and controlled by bank-like institutions and the crypto equivalent of the top 0.1% since most bitcoin is held in a very small amount of wallets.

Its premise is now basically to replace one shitty system for another shitty system but one that's unregulated and powered by memes and waste of electricity.

[not2b]

Central banks don't print unlimited fiat, they strike a balance between inflation and deflation. Anyone thinking that they can "print unlimited fiat" winds up like Zimbabwe. "Print" too much, and there's inflation. Too little, and there's deflation. But most money isn't printed, it's just balances on bank statements; the central banks control the money supply by regulating banks. With Bitcoin, there's no intelligent control, just rules that produce deflation, meaning it might be attractive as an investment but it doesn't work as currency.

[orwin]

The issue with a deflationary money is that it reduce exchange rate (you try to hog as much as you can), thus reducing GPD. That's an issue for everyday money (and why the dollar was decorellated from gold).

I think the blockchain is a good idea, even as a simple money ledger, but the scarcity BTC holders praise is an inherent issue that will make bitcoin less and less usefull as a currency, and while the price will probably stay high for the foreseeable futur, i think BTC won't ever be adopted by institutions, at least not long-term.

Other cryptocurrency that don't have the deflationary issue might be adopted officially though though (but, the future is uncertain)

[empath75]

the idea that any crypto currency is scarce is nonsense. It is only scarce by convention, so long as traders decide that one particular block chain is the One True Blockchain. There are many forks of bitcoin, as well as many other cryptocurrencies. If it ever becomes financially worth while for a group of people to turn on the bitcoin money spigot either through forking or launching a new cryptocurrency, it _will_ happen, and the value of bitcoin could evaporate over night. It's trivially easy to launch a new cryptocurrency as we saw in the last bubble.

[nullc]

Everything is only scarce "by convention". By convention we don't call also silver "gold" and treat the two metals as equivalent for money-like purposes, though we could-- just like people could by convention choose to adopt some radically incompatible system and call it Bitcoin, but they don't and likely won't.

Critically though, no one can force you to adopt a fake bitcoin. True, you wouldn't be very happy being the last holdout on the real thing due to network effects-- but even there you could still hold on if other people were stupid... and that's about any strong and independent as anything used as a money ever could be, because money inherently gets its value from network effect.

[empath75]

Nobody can force you to adopt the real bitcoin, either, in the way that a government can force you to pay taxes and debts in dollars.

[nullc]

A government could force you to pay taxes and debts in Bitcoin.

[thinkmassive]

Your numbers are close but I'm not sure where you found them. The subsidy went from 12.5 to 6.25. It started at 50, and it's reduced by a right bit shift ("the halving") every 210k blocks:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/0.19/src/validation....

[AnimalMuppet]

"The universe's scarcest asset"? That would be unobtanium; there is no supply of it whatsoever. ;-)

But how do you measure "scarcest"? Hardest to develop new sources? Is the year-over-year increase in bitcoin smaller than in gold? (Year-over-year because that gives a measure of how hard it is to create/find more of the asset, which seems a decent measure of "scarce".)

[birdyrooster]

There is a finite amount of gold and it’s a lot less likely to stop being useful in the future for many many high tech uses.

[unhashable]

I do not know how much gold is in the earth’s crust or in passing asteroids, but I do know how many Bitcoin there are: 21 million.

https://aidaily.co.uk/articles/artificial-intelligence-and-s...

[birdyrooster]

Okay well we do know how much gold is in Earth's crust: On average, a ton of rock from the crust holds 0.005 grams of gold-compared to 58,000 grams of iron. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/gold/incomparable-gold/form...

Also, we can talk about this again in 30 years or so when we actually have mining products return from space, how much do you want to bet that Bitcoin is still relevant in 30 years?

[shse]

What about other cryptocurrencies?

[brokensegue]

> the universe's scarcest asset

So like Americium? Or maybe antimatter?