Bitcoin Forum

Much of the debate surrounding bitcoin's scaling problem seems to stem from two different visions of what bitcoin should be right now: a store of value or a peer-to-peer digital cash system. Both sides agree that in the long run both of these properties should be met, but the question is: Will bitcoin hold value even if TX throughput does not scale soon or do we risk losing our first mover advantage if bitcoin is not able to fulfil its promises as a peer-to-peer cash system soon.

I would love to hear some arguments from both sides of this debate

Yes, we will lose the "store of value" advantage if the currency simply... doesn't work, which would happen if nobody was worried in scaling Bitcoin. Which isn't the case. I think it's too early to question if we're losing out on what we have in one pocket to fill the other pocket, I don't think the scaling issue is affecting the store of value part (and people seem to be valuing Bitcoin quite a lot on markets lately).

Something that could help us better define an answer to this question is coin age and if the coins being moved are "old" (and probably came from cold storages) or "new". Then again, there's the "probably" part in this data that might not exactly relate to the issue... But it's the best we have, I think.

The irony is that in order to be peer to peer CASH you cannot have big blocks, and in order to have fast onchain transactions you would need HUGE blocks, which means the coin is no longer cash, it's just peer to peer payments...

So you have to choose:

1) Big blocks with centralized network and fast and cheap big volume onchain payments
2) Conservative blocks with decentralized network with second layer on top for the fast and cheap big volume payments

Option 2 is the common sense one: you dont want to centralize the network.

THERE ARE NO OTHER MAGIC SOLUTIONS.

I think that actual meaning of BTC 'value' is an obstacle for adopting it as a common cash system. People see Bitcoin as a subject of speculation, that they also can participate in. How anyone can think about spending BTC on daily basis if its market price can swing +25%/-25% during one week? It would be like: "Oh god, suddenly I have 25% less money in my wallet, even though I haven't spend a satoshi!".
In other hand, if blockchain would suffer serious technical problems due to network traffic, people could stop using that even for trading.
  

expanding utility positively increase value
intentionally limit utility negatively decrease value

its not a case of one or the other. we need to expand utility to positively affect value.

in short if you cant spend bitcoin in the 300k+ merchants and it costs too much to withdraw your funds from a exchange (fee war gets too much)

they end up returning to fiat because fiat withdrawals are cheaper or
users end up losing funds due to 'hacks' out of fear of not wanting to withdraw...

people lose out and the value/utility and desire because they cant do anything with bitcoin and it costs too much to hold independently

oh be quiet with your fake only 2 option scenarios..

thinking dynamic blocks leads to centralization is a failure of your understanding.

you do realise that having litenode, no witness mode, pruned mode, LN hub mode has far higher risk of diluting the full node counts.

as for dynamic blocks.. if nodes cant cope with a large rise in bandwidth, they wont vote for it..
dynamic blocks are also "conservative"(to use the scripted rhetoric buzzword of the core fanboys) by only activating extra buffer when the majority flag that they can cope with it. meaning sensible natural capable rises over time.

please slap whoever is passing you the fake rhetoric to repeat.

the obvious buzzwords repeated simultaneously by one sided biased people is becoming very clear its a script you lot are reading
"conservative" "bigblocks"

the funny thing is those wanting onchain scaling want 2mb.. the BIPS show this.
the group with the 4mb weight.. is actually the crew passing out the scripts of buzzwords pointing the finger in the other direction..

This is a good question and debate. The more liquidity we see across the entire available coins the lower price we'll see, and certainly more stable. The more people hodl, the more the price will rise.

I realize that throughput constraints may turn some folks off, it will lower liquidity. But that doesn't mean it will lower the value of bitcoin. A decrease in value will only come when there are more sellers than buyers, literally. So if liquidity becomes tough, but people still see "store of value" value in bitcoin we'll continue to see the price rise over the long term.

The shorter term fluctuations will always  occur and are indicative of direct buying an selling moves. We see a dip after the holidays, perhaps people are taking earnings in bitcoin to replinsh their fiat reserves or simply because there has been a run up.


The greatest challenge in trying to find causation in bitcoin price movements is doing so with social or business events...the currency is so global that it's hard to attribute one country's actions to the movement of the price of bitcoin.

"store of value" has a limit.

some people think scarcity is a thing.. but if only 10 people hold say 42coin.. this does not make 42coin worth a few billion dollars..
utility plays a part of it.

if it has no utility then it doesnt matter how rare it is, no one needs to use it so no one wants it so no one asks for it.
its why all of the altcoins with small supply fail. because they think scarcity alone is a value creator

another example.

housing market.
people think if they buy a house at say $500k their asset will always hold a store of value of $500k..

check out the last 9 years and see if thats true.

when there is no demand for houses because people cant afford them or doesnt see the need of a 5 bedroom house or there is something else people see that does have utility for them thats not your house.. after a while you start dropping your ask price below $500k to tempt a quicker purchase. thus the house loses value.

now imagine it for something someone doesnt "NEED" at all because it does nothing tangibly..
scarcity is no longer something to rely on as a value store

Store of value was a byproduct that took over. However i think we can have both. And Bitcoin should see to it, that the problem will be solved quickly, because People will realise that they can have both somewhere else and migrate to an altcoin.

i do not agree with this statement be with "or" or "vs" these two need an "and" because they go hand in hand with each other.
if the peer-to-peer digital cash system part fails then in my opinion bitcoin is a number on the screen that people pay real money for, and nothing more.
the adoption as currency can help bitcoin more forward, not having a small group of traders buy and sell bitcoin from each other until they get tired and move on. when new merchants start accepting bitcoin, new services start adding bitcoin payment,... more people will come and price goes up too. and for that we need bitcoin to be able to handle more transactions as it does now.

and as i said these go hand in hand, as people use it as store of value and a trading toy, price becomes volatile and it prevents the other side (being a currency) to shine and be a viable option.

think ab out it, if you have one you have the other, if you have store of value it mean tht bitcoin has a very biug value or it will have one in the future, this translate in having a big adoption

and therefore its utility will also be very big as a result, they are connected, it's like the connection between adoption and high price

i think bitcoin still hold value even if the transaction is need time to get confirms, and value is related with utility and i am sure that in the future, the transaction is no need too long to gets confirmed. but i am agree that we should solve the problem in confirming transaction because no one wants to be waited too long to see for full confirmed of transaction.

For me the security should be the biggest concern. If we rush into bigger blocks and this pose a threat to the security, then trust will be influenced and we will lose both options. Satoshi made provision for scaling as needed in small increments and in my opinion this is not done lately or rather delayed to pave the way for SegWit or LN. The main thing to determine is, if this scaling is necessary and how much scaling needs to be done. Take away all the unnecessary additions to the code and do what needs to be done.

You will get much faster consensus, if smaller scaling was done. ^hmmmmm^

I don't know if both sides actually agree but I can say with certainty that a store of value function of Bitcoin pretty much excludes its use as a peer-to-peer digital cash system (basically, as a currency). You don't even need to scry into the future since it has always been the case in history, where you can look for examples proving this point of view. Back then, gold coins were stashed (and paid taxes with) while silver specie was actually used for circulation...

Therefore, I don't think that the paradigm of bad money driving out good from circulation is going to change any time soon (or ever)

Store of value, and utility are not dependent on each other. Did gold drop in value because gold coins ceased to be used as a payment method? Increased value may well reduce use as a payment system. The current UK £100 gold coin will cost you getting on for £1,000 to buy, so who would use that for a £100 purchase. I can see Bitcoin being used as a proof of stake for an alternative currency in the future. How will that affect Bitcoin? I believe it will reduce pressure on the blockchain, and stabilise the price, this could lead to a gradual increase in value.

After a recent poll something like 79% of those surveyed said they cared most about decentralisation.  but i dont think the average user would care how we achieve that, so core need to just come up with an idea that will make bitcoin usable to the masses but yet keep that decentralised nature,  nobody wants to go back to a system where you are told how and when to use your own money.  ;)

the gold coin rose in value ven when not used as legal tender because gold had other UTILITY. EG jewellery, circuit boards. so it was not just about scarcity as the remaining feature. it still had utility which impacted scarcity.

but if bitcoin ever got to a point of no transactional use. and people just treated them as hoarded assets. then there is no utility, no "NEED" so desire shrinks and the supply/demand ratio changes to less demand.

just look at all the altcoins that have no utility even if they have scarcity. such as 42 coin..
42coin is not 500,000x the value of bitcoin.. its not even 1x the value of bitcoin.. even if its scarcity is 500k more scarce.

in short bitcoin needs utility to have value.

anyone desiring to remove bitcoins utility should just go play with the fiat they dream and hope about everynight

You evidently totally neglect the financial aspect of gold (and gold derivatives), i.e. its utility as a speculative asset


Oh, you seem to have learned the lesson that scarcity itself means nothing

Namely, that being scarce without being useful doesn't amount to anything. That's good but the next thing that you should understand is that there is no absolute scarcity, scarcity is always relative in respect to some amount, quantity, or number. In this way, 42 shitcoins may be less scarce that 21 million bitcoins. For example, when 21 million people are interested in Bitcoin (1 bitcoin per capita) and only one individual in that shitcoin (42 shitcoins per capita), Bitcoin will obviously be more scarce on the whole per unit of coin

i know your trying to think outside the box, which is commendable compared to other people. but im a few boxes outside of your box.
im just downplaying it to the most simplistic explanation for normal people to grasp.

as for scarcity. knowing that once it reaches X production, thats it.. no more.. means scarcity.
unlike renewable resources, such as tree's that produce seedlings which can produce more tree's endlessly and forever..
bitcoins scarcity is a known number, right from day one.. its a fixed number.

supply and demand then takes over within this scarcity amount. which is about speculation.
for anything that has utility, speculation has resistance points, there is always a resistance point where people refuse to sell for anything less because thats the point of what some deem true value. due to the utility element undrlying the speculation. and the value on top of the resistance point is the more variable amount where supply and demand plays out.

golds "speculative asset" as you said is not based on scarcity(supply). its based on demand. and gold has UTILITY which drives the demand. which drives the speculatory value both with the resistance point(normally not known about) then the variable bit on top...

however gold will not ever sink to absolute $0 because it has other utility (jewellery/circuits) so there is always an underlying resistance point of cost of production, utility and other factors keeping it above some level. yet bitcoin IF it has no utility CAN sink to $0... like many altcoins have proven.
one of bitcoins key resistance points is actually cost of production.. (usually about 25-75% lower than exchange rate price depending on volatility and miners costs)
but if demand and utility die off.. so will the miners. thus the resistance point can drop too when the difficulty drops due to less miners. double impacting the drop.

yes its not going to be an overnight occurrence. but a long slow drop to $0.. but it is possible IF bitcoin loses its utility

bitcoin is a payment currency. without being used as payment(merchants drop it because the fee's become too high to handle) then demand drops. the variable speculative xchange rate drops. miners dont make profit so they drop out, the resistance point drops.. and a snowball effect occurs slowly(compared to other alts) down to $0.
bitcoin has no other utility to eat up supply, such as jewellery creation, circuit creation. so bitcoin cannot speculate based on a supply..
yes you can throw some coin into some 'bitcoin eater' addresses. but we already agreed scarcity does not help something with no utility or desire


unlike gold.. monetary currency can tank to the bottom its monetary utility is lost.. even if they have some behind the scenes banking products (you mentioned derivatives for instance).. but even with these banking products in the background pretending to be 'of value' to hold up the front end currencies value.. they too are speculative. and again can tank to $0..

check out the zimbabwe dollar or other world currencies that have no utility.. they have no value at all!! even if they had banking products backing them.

so in a paradigm where no one needs to use it and supply is not even a factor.. demand drop = value drop = further demand drop.. snowballing into an endless drop of value.

bitcoin needs to have UTILITY to have VALUE

The biggest concern of bitcoin today is not the issue on value versus utility but the survival of bitcoin. The issue should be bitcoin versus fiat virtual currency. The biggest threat to bitcoin is now closing and will be released this year and it is a big question if bitcoin will still be up to the challenge and continue to survive or will be replaced by the fiat currency.

You are self-contradicting in your arguments. At first you assert that bitcoin scarcity is a known number from day one, and then you proceed to basically claim that supply and demand define scarcity. While I agree on the second case, in the first case 21M bitcoins have nothing to do with scarcity as such. It is simply a number, it doesn't tell us anything about scarcity on its own as I'm trying to explain it to you for the nth time

So it kinda looks that you are not a few boxes outside mine, you are just entirely out of your own box


You again lump together and confuse different concepts

yep
bitcoins threat is fiat. if bitcoin becomes no better then fiat no one will want it.

the threat is Hyperledger. which is the banks own blockchain currency powerhouse of multiple interchangeable chains. which laughably the blockstream paid core devs are actually helping the bankers with.. and yes them hyperledger crew have been invited to have special secret talks at this months 'satoshi roundtable'.

so incase your wondering why Sipa, Gmaxwell, adam back matt corallo and other blockstream devs are so ademnt to cripple bitcoins onchain growth for no RATIONAL reason. and why they have changed the fee estimation engine to push the average fee more biasedly up rather than down.. it becomes obvious once you look at who is paying their salary and sitting with them over cocktails at an all inclusive weekend this month

no. i said supply and demand work within scarcity not define scarcity.

EG a apple store may know there are 21million apple phones in a warehouse but are only able to sell 20 phones at the shop (supply=20, not 21m)
there are only 2 customers wanting it. so after 6 months, the store reduces the price of the phone before the next-gen phone hits the market (demand=2, not 20, not 21m)

bitcoins current 16mill circulation and 21m scarcity has nothing to do with supply and demand.
EXCHANGES.. here is the kicker you missed. EXCHANGES are not hoarding all 16m-21mil coins.
at most the SUPPLY is a couple hundred thousand coins per exchange.

and the EXCHANGE price is based on the supply and demand of the couple hundred thousand coins (not 16m not 21m)

which is where the supply and demand is the speculation within scarcity. but not impacted by scarcity

EG think about food. some regional distribution centre may have tonnes of baked beans.
but people dont care about whats in the regional distribution centre. they only care about whats available at the local store.

if an crisis happens where everyone buys up the stores food because there wont be a delivery. (supply drop) everyone speculative their need and demand for it. and suddenly food becomes a premium priced product where people are literally willing to sell their oldest daughter in an extreme crises event..

As long as China has monetary problems, I dont worry about Bitcoin, since that is the main source of cashflow into Bitcoin.

But as a global vehicle for wealth storage. Well, first you have to get these smartasses to listen to you.

The smartasses who put their money in a bank at 1% interest, while the inflation is 10%. You have to educate those dumbasses first.

If they are so stupid to fall into that kind of trap, maybe they dont even deserve Bitcoin as a wealth storage.

I know that you didn't say nor implied that. But this is exactly how scarcity is determined, i.e. through a supply and demand mechanism (strictly speaking, through change in supply and demand)


Does just 21 million iPhones packed in some obscure warehouse tell us anything about scarcity?

If it does tell, then is this quantity of iPhones scarce or abundant? If it is neither scarce nor abundant, what the heck does it have to do with scarcity at all in the first place? On the other hand, if this number alone doesn't tell us anything (which would be contrary to your claims, just in case), then what does then? I guess it is a number of people potentially buying these flashy phones, or rather a change in this number, which would define scarcity of iPhones (e.g. more scarce or less scarce). But the latter is defined exactly as I said above, i.e. through a supply and demand mechanism

what if i was to blow your mind and say that OKcoins 30k volume is not actually 30,000 people exchanging 1btc once. or 1person exchanging 30,000 coins once

what if i told you it was just 100 people exchanging just 0.3btc each ...1000 times a day

china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 1-30,000 coins each.
china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 1 coins each.
china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 0.00000x coins each.

china (1.3billion people) are not even involved in bitcoin.. only a couple hundred people and only small amounts are played per day. once you realise how day trading works.

many miners dont use 'public' exchanges. they do private OTC exchanges with VC's behind closed doors.
the mining pools are not that impacting of public xchanges with their hoards of fresh minted coins..

all they need to do is use a small amount on an exchange to day trade multiple times a day to cause a volume rise and also affect the price.

just look at the trade history.. you dont see orders of 12.5btc every 10 minutes or a large 75btc order an hour or a 1800btc order hit the market each day.
instead its lots of under 1btc orders. which make the lack of real liquidity because theres only a few thousand coins in reserve get smacked around a bit not needing thousands of coins to smack it but single to double figures done repeatedly

https://i.imgur.com/PoeomVJ.png

i think somewhere along the lines you have ignored me saying UTILITY is important. not scarcity.
also scarcity is a sliding scale from scarce to abundant..
which is more of a local/real ability to get your hands on/availability thing.

having scarcity is a limit of production.. but how scarce or abundant is a separate question.
also i said that "the latter is defined though supply and demand"

this is not a fight over who got the answer right first, but it seems your trying hard to make it sound like i think scarcity is important when in MANY posts i have said UTILITY is important.. so i dont know why you are meandering down the 'scarcity' rabbithole..

but getting to the point. UTILITY means/affects value, not scarcity

most traders dont even know the exact number of coins in circulation. nor the supply in an exchange.. they only think about the demand and desire aspect of the speculation.

which UTILITY has the major impact on

If people insist to use bitcoin only as commodity that is the gold standard 2.0 because of its digital scarcity correct me if  I am wrong but I believe the network performance will not be a very important matter because the transactions would not be particularly high so will not have an overload network traffic. On the other hand the vision of Nakamoto about a peer to peer payment system using the internet without the need of any third trust entity disappears. This means that banks will endure their dominance due to free knowledge of blockchain technology which will allow them to create their own digital currencies. Therefore all scenarios about a dream world without banks will collapse in the very near future. To summarize first we must consider the utility and after the value of bitcoin

How do you know that fore sure? There are many exchanges, and in the chinese exchanges, there are mostly chinese people trading.

Looking at the volume of 1,609,323.75 BTC daily, I hardly doubt those are all bots.

Who the heck would do 1000 trades / day? Even if you run a bot that is absurd.

Maybe there are a handful of market maker bots, but the rest are just probably young chinese guys trading 1-10 BTC with their savings.

The chinese are known to be big gamblers, and they also spend a lot of tech items, so its easy to assume that there are probably tens of thousands of chinese trading 1-10 btc.

bitcoin is not a commodity.
a commodity is a raw product used to create other products.
EG crude oil =fuel, plastics
EG gold= jewellery, circuits

gold specifically sits on MULTIPLE markets because it has multiple USES/desires/demands for it. dont confuse golds commodity(manufacturing industry) market as the same thing as its asset value(speculative investment financial industry)

bitcoin is an asset currency. not a commodity. but if it loses its utility of being an active currency and just sits on some hardware wallet, much like a bearerbond. (which is still a currency but not an active currency). then its value dies because it lacks something concrete backing it. meaning the asset value declines.. which snowballs down

did you look at the trade history image.. right column.. trades under 1btc...
they are not large 1000btc trades per hit..

as for 10's of thousands of chinese trading.......... well thats still not 1.3billion.. so lets not continue the endless racism of thinking "china"(whole country) own/control bitcoin

when we all know its only a small percentage playing with small amounts repeatedly.

i would cry wolf only if you see trade history results of 10-1000btc+ every few minutes.
these small 0.xbtc orders happening is not "china (the country) own bitcoin"

My point doesn't consist in proving you wrong

This comes as a nice bonus, though I'm mostly trying to explain why you are wrong so that you could understand that. Scarcity is in no way a limit of production since I could just as easily claim that a volume of production is in fact a measure of abundance, not scarcity ("half empty glass is half full"), and what does it tell us exactly? If production increases does it imply that what is produced becomes less scarce (and vice versa), which should directly follow from your reasoning? I guess we can't generally say that, and the reverse is also true. This is another argument that shows that your approach is futile and meaningless. It pretty much proves that volume, or limit of production can't be scarcity or a measure of it. Scarcity is an abstract concept which in real life can be used only as a relative measure. We can't even say that something is scarce as such since we should always refer it something else over which it is more (or less) scarce or over itself if we consider the issue on a time scale. Regarding utility, it is more complex concept than scarcity, and until you get familiar with this simple concept in a correct way, it doesn't make particular sense to discuss utility

I'm not racist. I like China, the Chinese culture is very nice, and I also like Buddhism.

However you also have to admit that they are controlled by a communist government, which means usually heavy restrictions of private property.

So if they decide to regulate it some day (like for example recently) I am not sure if that will be positive.

Sure 10000 Chinese is a small number comparing to the 1.3 bn, but it's not about the users, its about the exchanges.

If you cut down the roots of the tree, that tree will never grow.

As far as I understood it's not exactly the problem here.
The problem is to find a scalable solution. One which will work in the long run. Because incrasing blocks isn't a solution at all, it just erase the problem for a few months thats all!

I'm not a specialist, but it seems like LN and Segwit might get all of this straight. I just don't know why miners haven't accepted it yet.

There's head and tails, positive and negative people. Similarly there will be holders and there will be sellers. This thread will get many arguments and people will argue limit less. For me both are good. Though I prefer to use it cashless cause it's convenient and it's easy. Though sometimes I hold it to. So it's difficult to say which one is right. It's every one discretion, you should add a vote.

which is where i said being scarce.. abundant.. is a separate detail to scarcity.. where scarcity is a sliding scale

my reasoning is not that. i stated a few posts ago.. bitcoins limit is known. has been known since day one.
the scarce<->abundance is separate question within the sliding scale.

my approach?? lol sorry but your the trying to confuse the matter. by ultimately saying im wrong but then saying the exact same thing i said to claim your right.


seems your trying hard to muddy the water..

things can have scarcity..
but how scarce<->abundant is a separate question (remember the WITHIN word you failed to pick up on)
also yes scarce<->abundant is an abstract concept.. hense why in earlier posts i was saying no one cares much about it and its UTILITY thats important.

but if you think no one should talk about utility (the important thing) until they circle jerk you about less important things.. then you are a fool

now lets just drop this unimportant scarcity meander you have rabbit holed down. and get back on topic.

UTILITY creates value, lack of UTILITY removes value

In fact, I gave you a chance to get off cheap

But since you obviously don't want to take it and thus save your face, you surely deserve to learn it the hard way. So you are basically claiming that scarcity is a limit of (in) production. In this manner, 21M bitcoins is the scarcity of Bitcoin (a measure thereof), right? You don't need to pour your mostly empty verbiage on me in reply, just say "yes" or "no"

i corrected your post.
i see where you are trying to slide words in to confuse the matter to then twist the matter to then ultimately say what i originally said but you would say im wrong because of the words YOU slipped in. i see your game. nice try though

21M bitcoins is the scarcity limit

we both agreed that scarce<->abundance is the measure within the limit
scarce<->abundance AKA the measure within AKA supply/demand is the measure of scarcity

but no one takes much notice about supply. because they cannot say exactly how much supply an exchange they are using actually has or how much % of circulation or the end limit that works out as.

all they care about is the demand. which is derived from UTILITY
have a nice day

now back to the topic
UTILITY creates value, lack of UTILITY removes value

Scarcity limit? So it is the scarcity of Bitcoin when all coins have been mined?

If I got your point correct, this still comes down to claiming that current production (e.g. number of bitcoins mined so far) is the scarcity of what is being produced (if 21M bitcoins is the scarcity limit for Bitcoin). Do you agree with that, yes or no? Apart from that, you should know it yourself that scarcity has direct impact on utility and value (though just scarcity alone is not enough, obviously), therefore the question of scarcity is always "on topic". Didn't you say essentially the same in your earlier posts in this thread?

put it this way

in 2009 we knew what the scarcity limit was: 21m
boom. no more.... its a fixed amount, no surprises.. no shocks.. nothing up its sleaves.. hence LIMIT

now imagine 2 words.. scarcity... and scarce.
now please take a breather and realise.. these are 2 different words with 2 meanings. even if they look similar, they mean different things.
you may be mind blown. so take some time and have a coffee..
 ..
ok now then
how scarce<->abundant is the supply and demand question WITHIN.
again dont confuse scarce and scarcity.. might be worth having another sip of coffee and let your thoughts play it out a little longer
 ..
ok now then
how scarce<->abundant is the supply and demand question WITHIN.
 ..
so,
even on day 1 of bitcoin in 2009 we know the scarcity limit..
and separately we want to think about how scarce<->abundant bitcoin is
 ..
remember this is where we are talking about supply and demand.. not scarcity limit
remember supply and demand is speculative
 ..
well even on day 1 there were only a few coins and only a couple people held them thus dominating circulation.. so some would say scarce..
but, yes here is the but.. (remember the supply demand/scarce<->abundance  is just subjective and speculative)
no one was trading, people were just accumulating them for little to no work. so others would say abundant. especially if there were still 20,999,xxx coins to go
 ..
now we move onto a different day, different amount of coins being shared. people start competing over them and the 'bitcoin pizza' proves bitcoin has utility. the sliding scale shifts abit, but its speculative with differing mindsets on both sides

fast forward 7 years. mega mining farms.. 300,000+ merchants.. 2mill plus users.. from a macro nation overview of the whole thing now its treated as speculatively scarce by many people.. but.. abundant by others.(more claim scarce than abundant)
again we both agreed scarce<->abundant is subjective/speculative

here is the kicker
although thinking about it from the whole network view in last sentence, inside an exchange is a micro nation of speculation where supply and demand is at a fight.. most dont know about the supply within an exchange. so its more of a game around the reasons for or against demand..

so now we separate the argument about supply..... where your rhetoric of trying to highlight scarcity drops away and becomes unimportant..

and we move onto the reasons for or against demand..
so demand.

people desire it because they can spend it, move it hold it. get things for it make profit from it.
people dont desire it if it costs to much to have, costs to much to spend, isnt easy to use.

which are all about utility..

take away utility then demand dries up
if demand dries up those holding the supply drop their prices to try getting shot of it before they lose to much if they see no future plans for increased/new utility.
snowball effect

I don't read your empty verbiage

As to me, it is perfectly clear that instead of simply answering either yes or no, you are now trying to obfuscate the issue through phrase-mongering and verbosity. It is as clear that if you mean 21M bitcoins as the scarcity limit of Bitcoin, then the number of bitcoins mined till now would as well be the current scarcity of bitcoins. So your answer should necessarily be "yes", whether you like or not (otherwise, you would be discarding everything you said before). But in that case, your claim to what is scarcity is outright bullshit (which you seem to realize somehow) since this number is algorithmically predetermined, and it doesn't and can't possibly take into account the changes in demand, which is what the real scarcity of Bitcoin is determined by and stands for