Rare Is Not Scarce
- Rare Things Have a Ceiling (And We Keep Raising It)
- The Asteroid Problem
- True Scarcity. 21 Million. Full Stop.
- Why This Matters For Your Money
- The Ceiling
Gold is rare. Diamonds are rare. Beachfront property is rare. Not one of them is actually scarce. There’s only one thing on the planet that is, and you already know what it is.
People use the words “rare” and “scarce” like they mean the same thing. They don’t. And once you see the difference, you can’t unsee it.
Rare means hard to find. Scarce means there is a fixed amount, there will never be any more, and you can prove it.
That’s a massive difference. Arguably the most important difference in the whole history of money.
Rare Things Have a Ceiling (And We Keep Raising It)
Gold feels limited. Diamonds feel limited. Land feels limited. That feeling is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.
Because here’s the thing, we keep finding more of all of them. When the price goes up, the miners dig deeper, the explorers look harder, the machines get better and out comes more supply. Every single year.
The World Gold Council puts all the gold ever mined at around 216,000 tonnes at the end of 2024. Mine production that same year? Roughly 3,661 tonnes, a record or as near as makes no difference. That’s the above-ground stock growing at somewhere around 1.5 to 2% a year, year in, year out. Nobody votes on it. Nobody can stop it. More gold just turns up.
And it gets better. We can literally make the stuff.
Back in 1980, Glenn Seaborg’s team at Berkeley turned bismuth into gold using a particle accelerator. In 2025, CERN’s ALICE experiment reported that lead nuclei had been turning into gold during collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.
Now, before the goldbugs start typing, yes, the amounts were tiny. A few thousand atoms in Seaborg’s case, a few trillionths of a gram at CERN, at a cost that makes the whole thing completely pointless as a business. Nobody is opening a gold factory next week.
But the point stands. Gold can be made. The “nobody can make more of it” story was never quite true. It just hasn’t been cheap. Yet.
The Asteroid Problem
Now let’s have a bit of fun.
In October 2023, NASA launched the Psyche mission. It’s heading to an asteroid called 16 Psyche, which scientists believe is unusually rich in metal, quite possibly the leftover core of a planet that never finished forming. It’s due to arrive around 2029.
Psyche isn’t a mining mission. It’s science. But the companies and governments talking seriously about space mining aren’t joking either, and that conversation is a lot closer than most people think.
So ask yourself a simple question. What happens to gold’s story the day a gold-rich asteroid becomes minable? Or the day someone announces they’ve worked out how to make gold cheaply?
The whole “safe haven” narrative cracks. Overnight. Because gold’s value rests heavily on the belief that nobody can just produce loads more of it. Take that belief away and the money sitting in gold has to go somewhere.
I know exactly where I’d want it to go. And it isn’t another rock.
Gold can be found. Bitcoin can’t be made.
True Scarcity. 21 Million. Full Stop.
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. Not roughly. Not “subject to revision.” Not “until we find a new seam.” Twenty-one million.
At the time of writing, a little over 20.1 million have already been mined, with the remainder trickling out on a schedule that halves every four years until the last fraction of a coin around the year 2140. Every Bitcoiner on the planet knows that schedule because it’s written in the code.
And this is the bit that really matters. You don’t have to trust anyone. Run a node and you can verify the total supply yourself. Not the World Gold Council’s estimate. Not a central bank’s press release. Not some bloke on telly. You. Your own machine, checking every block, every coin, back to the Genesis Block.
Try doing that with gold. Try auditing every vault, every mine, every bit of jewellery on the planet. You can’t. Nobody can. You just have to take their word for it (and we all know how that tends to go).
No discovery adds more Bitcoin. No new technology adds more Bitcoin. No price spike sends miners out to find a fresh seam of Bitcoin. Higher price, more miners? Fine. The difficulty adjusts and the issuance stays exactly where it was. That’s not a bug. That’s the whole bloody point.
And it actually gets tighter than 21 million. Coins get lost. Forgotten passwords, binned hard drives, early miners who passed away with their keys. Estimates usually put lost coins somewhere around 3 to 4 million. Gone. Forever. Nobody is ever printing those back into existence.
Why This Matters For Your Money
This isn’t a fun fact for the pub quiz. This is about your savings.
When the supply of something can grow, whoever controls that growth controls you. Fiat is the extreme case. On 15 August 1971, Nixon “temporarily” suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold. Over fifty years later, still waiting on temporary to end. That was the day the last brake came off the money printer, and every government on earth has had its foot on the gas ever since.
We’ve talked about that one before. Nixon broke it** **.
Gold was a better anchor than paper. Of course it was. But it was always rare, never truly scarce, and that gap is exactly where the trouble crept in.
Bitcoin closes the gap. Unbreakable scarcity means your savings can’t be quietly diluted. No committee. No chancellor sneaking in at 3am. No asteroid. No particle accelerator. The rules are the same for a kid stacking sats on their phone as they are for a nation state.
Do I think that shows up in the price over the long run? Honestly, yes. Hard money in a world drowning in soft money only really goes one way over time. But I’m not your financial adviser and I’m not here to give you a number. I’m here to tell you why the number exists in the first place.
The Ceiling
Every rare thing in history has had the same weakness. Push the price high enough and someone finds more, digs more, or makes more. Rarity is just a puzzle waiting for a better shovel.
Bitcoin isn’t waiting for anything. There is no better shovel. There is no asteroid. There is only the code, and anyone on Earth can check it.
Rare is not scarce. 21 million is.**
If you get this, and if you’ve read this far, you clearly do, then wear it, Rare is not Scarce Hoodie** **. Our Classic B Orange High Tops carry a “21” on the tongue for the supply cap, our Nixon Broke It. Bitcoin Fixes It. Hoodie tells the other half of this story, and our Hal Black High Tops are for the ones who don’t just believe in Bitcoin but live it. Wear them to the next family dinner and wait for someone to ask why there’s a 21 on your sneakers. That’s your orange pill moment. Take it.
Physical scarcity has a ceiling. Bitcoin’s doesn’t.
🟠 Stack sats. Run a node. Wear the message. We are all Satoshi. 🧡
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