Time and bitcoin. The only two things human effort can’t produce more of.
Bitcoin is scarce the same way time is. We only have so much time on earth, there will only be so much bitcoin.
Everything else bends to incentive.
Gold can be created more of. Maybe it’s in the earth, the ocean, outer space. We will find more. We have an abundance of land. We can make underground, underwater structures. Maybe we even colonize Mars. If it’s feasible and profitable, the supply of homes, offices, and buildings will continue to be created.
Bitcoin breaks that relationship.
If the price went to $10 million per BTC, more people would try to mine. They’d buy ASICs, build warehouses of computers, bring more computational power onto the network. The key difference is the difficulty adjustment. To mine a bitcoin gets infinitely harder when more people are trying, ensuring a certain amount gets issued roughly every 10 minutes. Like a chameleon camouflaging into its environment, the difficulty adjusts. Everyone can see the monetary policy and it is unchangeable.
Bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap cannot be changed. To change the supply cap would be to fork the code and create an entirely new chain. Different rules, different hash rate, a new protocol. The original Bitcoin chain remains the same. Those that never left continue to reap the benefits.
What benefits you might ask? Well, I like to think money is stored time and stored energy. And if you were to save in something that can’t be printed, diluted, or inflated away, you preserve what you’ve already given to acquire it.