[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.