Your point about money demand and purchasing power is well-taken but incomplete.

In monetary economics, the predictability of a currency's supply does not inherently ensure its efficacy as a store of value. Bitcoin's protocol-enforced scarcity, capped at 21 million coins with diminishing issuance, aligns with Austrian economic principles of sound money, prioritizing absolute scarcity and verifiability over elastic supply models like Monero's tail emission.

As Saifedean Ammous argues, Bitcoin's transparent ledger and scalable divisibility, bolstered by second-layer solutions like ecash or Lightning as experienced here on Nostr, deliver both robust integrity and private, efficient transactions-outstripping alternatives prone to dilution or hidden centralization risks.

Even a tiny amount of money, like one dollar, could theoretically supply an entire economy if it’s divisible enough.

Author of The #Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean writes: “What matters in money is its purchasing power, not its quantity, and as such, any quantity of money is enough to fulfil the monetary functions, as long as it is divisible and groupable enough to satisfy holders’ transaction and storage needs.”

This comes from a summary of the book on Medium, which captures the essence of his argument about divisibility being key to a currency’s functionality, not its total amount.

Something else he's said that I agree with: Money’s effectiveness depends on how well it can be divided to meet economic demands, not how much of it exists. For example, even a single dollar could work if it could be split into tiny fractions for transactions, much like how Bitcoin’s is almost infinitely divisible supports its scalability and rids any concern of "elasticity".

A fixed supply, when paired with sufficient divisibility, can dynamically adapt to demand through market-driven adjustments in purchasing power, not artificial supply expansion. In summary, Bitcoin’s current and potential infinite divisibility through protocol upgrades or layered solutions eliminates the need for an elastic supply while preserving its scarcity.

This makes it a superior alternative to gold, which is prone to capture and supply shocks, fiat, which suffers from centralized overissuance or any ever increasing commodity, even if the increase is predictable.

Additionally, Bitcoin’s strictly capped supply of 21 million coins, paired with its scalable divisibility, distinguishes it from cryptocurrencies with perpetually increasing issuance, even if predictable.

Such coins, akin to commodities, risk gradual dilution of value and susceptibility to centralized mining incentives, undermining their long-term reliability as a store of value compared to Bitcoin’s unalterable scarcity.

By enabling transactions at increasingly granular levels, Bitcoin ensures that its fixed supply of 21 million coins can meet the demands of a global economy without diluting investors, rendering the elasticity argument obsolete.

Saifedean argues that Bitcoin’s fixed supply is a cornerstone of its value as a money.

Unlike fiat currencies, which central banks can print at will, or even gold, which can see supply shocks from new mining tech or discoveries, Bitcoin’s hard cap is coded into its protocol, making its scarcity absolute and predictable.

This fixed supply with new issuance halving roughly every four years mimics the increasing difficulty of extracting gold but without the physical world’s vulnerabilities, like new mines flooding the market.

In the book, he says Bitcoin’s supply schedule “ensures that at any point in time, there will only ever be a fixed amount in circulation, and no authority can change or violate this,” which he contrasts with gold’s historical supply swings, like the Spanish conquest or the California Gold Rush mentioned earlier.

This ties into his broader point that scarcity, enforced by code rather than physical limits, makes Bitcoin resistant to the capture and manipulation gold falls prey to.