One key factor where Bitcoin truly shines is its rarity. While gold is rare, Bitcoin is much rare because there is a limited amount of it that can come into existence. Whenever supply is restricted and demand is high, price goes up, so for me Bitcoin will continue to be a better store of value than Gold
Thinking of rarity in the way you do is meaningless
In other words, you can't possibly say that Bitcoin is rarer than gold (or the other way around). You can say that there are only 21M bitcoins (which somehow seems not a big deal) but I can easily challenge that point and claim that there are in fact 21
14 satoshi which are intuitively not as rare as measly 21 million bitcoins. I hope you can see now that numbers alone taken only by themselves don't mean a lot in respect to scarcity
. If you count bitcoins or count satoshis, it doesn't change the amount of Bitcoin in the world or make it less rare or otherwise alter his premise. He's saying Bitcoin is valuable because it's rare and finite. Breaking a Bitcoin down into satoshis doesn't challenge either of those premises
Well, it hasn't done anything
But that should have been expected. Moreover, that was exactly my point if you didn't get it. I just wanted to show that numbers alone are meaningless. There is no abstract scarcity, i.e. you can't say if 1 is more scarce than 2, in general. So just saying (or implying) that there are over 5.5 billions of troy ounces of gold mined till now and therefore Bitcoin with its 21M of coins (and with some coins yet to be mined) is more rare (scarce) than gold is as meaningless
This second explanation was much more clear than your original, because that point definitely didn't come across the first time.
Your first response didn't mention the comparison of bitcoins to gold, it only mentioned as a counter point to Bitcoin's "rarity" that 21 million coins can be divided into 21^14 satoshis, which logically doesn't make it any more or less rare than it was before
I did that intentionally
In fact, I even somewhat expected (should I say provoked?) that reply to lead you (as well as other readers, for that matter) to better understanding of what scarcity is and what it is not. Now it's time to drop gold from the equation completely. And if we drop gold, what does it change? Did Bitcoin's 21M coins become less scarce or more abundant? Well, that seems to mean the same, but never mind since it is basically the same as with 21
6 bitcoins versus 21
14 satoshi. The numbers alone, when taken in isolation, don't mean anything (in respect to scarcity, at least). Indeed, you could judge scarcity in an absolute sense of sorts (i.e. how many bitcoins can exist in the Universe) and claim, for example, that 21M bitcoins is certainly less abundant than 22M bitcoins (provided the latter was possible), but it doesn't have any practical implication since in real life just 1M bitcoins can be more abundant (i.e. less scarce) than 10M bitcoins
