> it's supply will remain constant after it has all been mined
Even this could change if the miners and thought-leaders decide that it should.
Even this could change if the miners and thought-leaders decide that it should.
The scarcity of Bitcoins is entirely a cultural delusion.
BTC proper is scarce, regardless of how many times the chain is forked.
You're right though, cultural convention decides which blockchain is the "real" Bitcoin. Most people are using BTC at the moment, but Bitmain takes payment exclusively in BCH.
This might seem like a semantic quibble, but I think it's important. There will only ever be 21 million BTC, and only ever 21 million BCH. If Bitmain decided to charge 22 million BCH for their latest ASIC miner, nobody would ever be able to pay that bill regardless of how many forks there are.
For a blockchain fork to have any value whatsoever, people need to want to own it. Bitmain ASIC sales are driving demand for BCH. Every other Bitcoin fork is doing rather poorly.
Forks aren't diluting the value of BTC, because people know that BTC is the real asset. Everything else is like fool's gold.
You can clone the technology, but you can't clone societal acceptance.
"the relative abundance of asteroidal ore gives asteroid mining the potential to provide nearly unlimited resources, which would essentially eliminate scarcity for those materials"
Apparently with the lack of a strong gravity like Earth's to sink down heavy metals, they are way more accessible in smaller bodies like asteroids (Ceres and Vesta maybe?)