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BTC has exactly one product left, and the product is scarcity—21 million coins, forever. One megabyte of base blockspace, defended like a holy relic since 2010. Seven transactions per second on a good day… And if the filter faction wins the BIP110 “election” this August 2026 (polling below one percent of miner signaling, campaigning anyway), a consensus-layer ban on most of what you were still allowed to do with the thing.
The pitch is that every one of those ceilings is a virtue, and that everything else (data, tokens, contracts, commerce itself) is contamination. That creed is not an engineering philosophy, and it never was. It is a moral posture: a wager that the future will fail, placed by people who are paid only if it does. And wagers like that shape the men who make them.
Let’s start with just a touch of grace on an otherwise critical look at their values: The 21 million coin cap is the one scarcity Satoshi actually designed, and it is genuinely brilliant monetary discipline because an emission schedule that no committee can vote looser, no Congress can inflate, and no crisis can amend is great. If the scarcity project had stopped there, I would have nothing to write about this week.
It did not stop there. The one-megabyte block cap arrived in 2010 as a temporary anti-spam patch and hardened into scripture. Now, 16 years later, the network still crawls, and its defenders call the bottleneck a feature!
Then came the newest scarcity, the scarcity of permission. Ordinals, inscriptions, tokens: valid transactions paying market-rate fees, following the rules as written, and half the network wants them banned at the consensus layer as “spam.” They want BTC to “be just money,” but the phrase does not mean money the way your grandfather meant it, a thing you earn and spend and build with. It means an object you bury in cold storage to “absorb” value from a collapsing world; actually spending it is a rookie mistake, and Laszlo Hanyecz, the first man to ever buy something with Bitcoin, gets retold as a cautionary tale instead of a founding father.
So what has to happen to the world for this bet to pay off?
For an asset with no yield, no throughput, and a shrinking menu of permitted uses to “absorb” the wealth of nations, the wealth of nations has to be running from something. The dollar has to burn. The banks have to seize. The economy has to rot badly enough that terrified capital pays any price for an exit. BTC does not need customers; it needs refugees. Its holders do not pray for growth, because growth is the competition. Every institution that fails, every currency that dies, every shortage that frightens a population is, in the argot of the faithful, “bullish.” Hold that bet long enough, and you might even start to need the collapse more than you fear it.
Values have downstream effects. A community that once built wallets, merchant tools, and payment processors now produces leverage vehicles and podcasts about the end of the world. Name another technology whose evangelists brag about how little it gets used. Michael Saylor, who has leveraged an entire software company into a BTC holding vehicle, declared last week that BTC has “no spam problem” because fees sit at 1 satoshi per vbyte: blockspace demand has evaporated, and the faithful scored the silence as purity!
An empty block is not purity; it is a vacancy sign, and the landlord is living on a shrinking subsidy.
Isn’t scarcity the whole point of sound money?
Scarcity of supply is a property. Scarcity of use is a suicide pact. The two have nothing to do with each other, and the entire small block religion rests on refusing to tell them apart.
Gold is the textbook scarce money, and no gold bug has ever proposed banning jewelry, electronics, or dentistry to keep gold “pure.” Gold earned its monetary premium because people kept finding new things to do with it: the uses built the demand, and the demand built the money. Money that nobody is allowed to use is not harder than gold. It is a collectible with a ticker symbol.
The designer settled this before the current priesthood had ever heard of the thing. In 2009, Satoshi wrote to Mike Hearn, the Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) engineer who would later be purged from the project for trying to scale it:
“The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling.”
In short, the original Bitcoin design contained exactly one scarcity, the coins, and engineered abundance into everything else. That is the fork in the road, and it is a moral fork before it is a technical one.
BSV kept the original bet: unbounded blocks, Teranode clearing a million transactions per second in testing, micropayments too small for a card network to bother billing, and data, records, and machine-to-machine commerce that cannot exist on seven transactions per second at any price. Tools that could not be built any other way, aimed at a future that wants more built, not less.
The man who buried his coin
Two thousand years ago, Jesus told a story about capital. A master leaves on a journey and entrusts three servants with five talents, two, and one (a talent being roughly 20 years of wages!) Two trade with the money and double it. The third explains himself in Matthew 25: “I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth.”
The master’s verdict is one of the harshest in the Gospels: “Thou wicked and slothful servant.” Get ready to quote the next verse every time somebody tells you the highest calling of money is a hole in the ground: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
First, let’s note what the third servant’s sin was not—not theft, not waste, not speculation. His sin was fear dressed up as prudence: he assumed a hard master and a closed world, buried the coin to protect himself from both, and produced exactly nothing with the gift he was given. Sound familiar? The King James translation’s word for what the builders receive is “abundance.”
Every money is a confession of what its holders believe about the future. HODL is an eschatology with a hardware wallet. The world is ending, so bury the coin, guard the hole, and wait for the rapture of the exchange rate. I confess the opposite. The world is not ending; it is unfinished, and an economy is not a pie to corner but a garden that repays whoever shows up with seed. A blockchain that welcomes every paying customer is a small, technical way of betting that human beings will keep making things worth paying for.
Scale is optimism, priced in satoshis.
The scarcity crowd will keep looking clever for as long as the only scoreboard is an exchange rate, and clever is all they will ever be: landlords of a city with no tenants, growing richer every year in a currency of fear, if they’re lucky.
But graves pay no dividends.
The abundance bet has to win the hard way: by being useful to people who will never read a white paper, one transaction at a time, until “digital gold” sounds as quaint as burying silver in the yard. That is a mission worth a working life, and it is open to anyone who can type.
Be good to each other. And go build something.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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