Yo sorry to interject and i agree with you but slight point of contention- Hawai’i is making new real estate almost every day. Is it really scarce? What about Martian real estate? Or Moon estates? Can’t technology unlock more of that asset?
Is it really scarcer than bitcoin?
Commenting only to see what she says in response. And it’s not just Hawaii. People are doing it for China, Denmark, Boston, the UAE..
Depends upon how you define it. The universe is full of planets, so "habitable surface of a planet with an ideal distance to the Sun" is mind-boggingly scarce, but "planet surface" is ubiquitous.
And land can be created, reclaimed, etc., but it seems to happen at a rate slower than Bitcoin emission (for now). There are often waiting lists for such land, despite it often having a high price, whereas it's still easy to buy Bitcoin. So, the creation of one outpaces demand, but not the other.
As the human population declines, "land on Earth physically close to other humans" will explode in value, whereas "land on Earth physically far from other humans" will become nearly worthless, or only useful for extraction (not agriculture). This is the internal contradiction to a demographic decline.
We can already see that, with governments paying people to resettle abandoned areas, in Europe. That resettlement will only work, sustainably, if a group of humans moves in tandem. For instance, our village has eye-watering real estate prices and a growing, wealthy, and relatively-young population... but there's one about 30 minutes from here, that's basically a ghost town. Everyone from there, has moved here. Humans clump together.
It's complicated.
The massive asset-advantage of Bitcoin, over real-estate, is that it's fungible. You don't have to figure out which one to buy, as they're all basically the same.
Therefore, you can't live in Bitcoin or grow plants on it, or whatnot.
I agree it’s complicated, but i guess my point of contention is in the relative nature of scarce in this context.
Sure, hospitable land is seemingly scarce when compared to inhospitable lands. But relative to the scarcity of bitcoin, I would suggest it is actually quite abundant.
Whatever unit of land you want to use, it would seem more than 21million humans are able to have a single unit of hospitable land.
DuckDuckGo AI says there are 11bilion farmable acres of land on earth, and my math suggests that’s enough for 1.375 acres per person. Much more than the .002625 bitcoin available per person.
The problem is that humans can't spread themselves that thin. One piece of hospitable land isn't exchangeable with another; its value depends almost entirely upon where it is located and who else is on it.
I guess they're not really comparable, since one is a fungible digital asset and the other is a subjectively-rated geographical asset.
Right. I hear the comparison made often though. Bitcoin kind of makes real estate a commodity again, useful for its resources, rather than a store of value as some previous generations considered.
