It makes sense to think of Bitcoin as a substance, like gold. I.e. uncountably. That's why, when talking about amounts, I don't use it as a countable noun; it's "how much bitcoin", not "how many bitcoins". You don't ask "how many golds does this earring have?", do you? (Not to be confused with capitalized Bitcoin, which is the network / tech / entity / concept.)
It's important that Bitcoin has a fixed supply, but the 21 million is irrelevant. It's an arbitrary number (in the context of its monetary properties anyway). The actual supply is 1, and ~0.92 of it has been mined already. (Note that you can't make a similar of statement about the USD. The closest approximation would be to say the dollar's supply is infinity, and 0 of it has been printed already - and only under the unrealistic assumption it will live forever. Doesn't sound enticing, huh?)
The smallest unit we use - currently sats - is just a parameter for a mapping from the continuous range [0, 1] to a discrete range of integers 0..n-1 so amounts can be represented more conveniently, in orders of magnitude we're used to. A quantization; like converting an analog image to a bitmap. As the value of the smallest unit grows too large to represent the value of the things we buy (we zoom in and our prices "pixelate") we just increase the resolution and introduce millisats, nanosats etc.
Some people have this bizarre idea that the fact we can increase the resolution of our quantization means Bitcoin is not scarce. That's like saying 50.648 is 3 orders of magnitude greater than 50, because it has 5 digits and not 2.
Yeah, you are on to something. Its understandable that people would not get that Bitcoin is scarce because it is the first digital property that has true scarcity. Its a hard concept to see unless someone explains it.
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21 millions BTC is an important number and is NOT random. Study a bit more all the numbers in Bitcoin. All of them have a specific meaning and are not random.
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Maybe you need to read more carefully.
(in the context of its monetary properties anyway)
We're not talking about numerology and symbols.
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This feels deeply true but somehow also only part of the story.
There’s something super odd and powerful going on when something is finite yet infinitely divisible.
It’s less like a substance and more like a black hole.
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Well, substances can only be divided down to a molecule or atom, Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, so that's one difference.
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If bitcoin is a substance, then I have a substance abuse problem
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I like this post. Thank you for writing this
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Good post, even if it's arguable.
I've tried to explain the whole "uncountable" concept to people before but it's a tricky one for sure :) Especially for people who aren't used to the concept from language learning.
It's pretty debatable whether there's any need to focus on continuous vs discrete; in the actual code, Satoshi had to use quantization, because computers are discrete (except for the fascinating "analog computers" - look them up they're great).
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