How did it go from zero to 21 million?
Discussion
how did gold go from 0 to unknown total amount
In quantity, supernova
In price, people wanted gold for jewelry or to fashion simple metal instruments (like lead, gold is malleable & makes good plumbing)
Then because it was durable people decided to save gold (later selling it to others for material uses).
But that can't happen with Bitcoin, there is no base case of jewelry or conducting electricity or whatever to bootstrap from. Instead it is a derivative of fiat which is a derivative of gold.
There was a monetization process of gold the same way there was with btc. It's not like humans were created wanting gold. In fact gold is in the demonetization process at the moment. The same way iron,bronze,silver (all were money at one point). have all mostly been demonetized gold will be too.
To the energy / information point. Money is energy dense because it's hard to create/find/ mine whatever. Then it's purely informational (transactional). Btc will surpass gold because it can store energy more efficiently and transmit its informational value more efficiently.
If you had a way to split gold down to the atom, and be able to physically move that atom anywhere in the world with no loss of information -no friction. Then gold would be competitive but its not.
How much energy does a Bitcoin store?
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
Each T/h is approx 120w and getting more dense as hardware improves.
So the later bitcoins store more energy than the earlier ones? Are they worth more?
The energy storage is cumulative. The blockchain is like a battery for the humans to draw from. Money is like a civilizational battery where we store excess labor.
The longer we can defer consumption the better off we will be as humans. Savings is just deferred consumption so in a way the early bitcoins are worth a lot now because those people deferred consumption the longest. Even tho 1btc = 1btc
Is not at 21 million. Also, where is the hyperinflation, again. 👀😆