As a thought experiment, imagine there was a physical asset as scarce as Bitcoin but with these properties: shiny yellow in colour, soft enough to shape into jewelry or bars, resistant to corrosion, and historically used as money and ornament across civilizations — and one special, non-magical property: it cannot be transmitted over a network, only moved slowly through physical space, guarded by vaults, borders, and armies.

Its scarcity is enforced not by code and math, but by geology and the cost of digging it out of the earth.