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Comment by lgrapenthin | Hacker News Reader

You can't inflate a coin by creating another coin. The markets for each coin aren't going to be identical, as each coin attracts a different set of buyers.

In other words, there might be people who would buy ETH, but never BTC and the other way around.

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...and there are others that would buy BTC if it was the only option but would be happy with ETH given that it exists. With those people buying / minting X instead of Y (but would use Y if X didn't exist), the amount of digital coins increased out of thin air just like that! Without any control mechanism from the bitcoin protocol (an unsolved / unsolvable(?) problem).

So the fact that the people like you say exists does not prevent the existence of the people that I am talking about.

And if the secure, easy to use, non-wasteful, programmable and distributed ledger problem is solved once then ALL coins after that become the same. In that environment "people who would buy ETH, but never BTC" will not make any sense.

You're effectively saying that once someone decides to grow potatoes, apples are no longer scarce, because people might instead grow potatoes and trade them for apples. The secure, easy to use, non-wasteful, distributed calorie problem can only be solved _once_, so ALL potatoes are apples.

If only apples existed and suddenly potatoes were invented, then plant-based carbohydrates just became less scarce.

If only British pounds existed and suddenly the Australian dollar was invented, you could suddenly do business in another currency.

Exactly.

Just like Swiss francs and Euros and US dollars are different things and will never be measured against or valued in terms of each other.

Q.E.D.

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