The danger of owning a fraction of the number line

What is Bitcoin that makes so many in the governments and establishment feel threatened?

The answer is scarcity. Bitcoin creates a new form of scarcity, digital scarcity and, most importantly, it uses a decentralised consensus mechanism to enforce the maintenance of this scarcity.

Bitcoins are not actually coins; owning an amount of Bitcoin is like owning a fraction of the number line that is 21 million units long (Bitcoin), or, more accurately, 2,100 trillion units long (satoshi). See my article “Simply Explaining Bitcoin” where I explain Bitcoin through a simple model of owning a fraction of the number line.

What governments from the USA to India to China, what economists from Nouriel Roubini to Joseph Stiglitz, what investors from Warren Buffet to Peter Schiff are scared of is a new form of scarcity, decentralised digital scarcity, that they can’t control or that they do not understand or, maybe, want to understand because they have succeeded in the old world of scarce asset schemes prior to the invention of Bitcoin.

Decentralised digital scarcity is here to stay, it cannot be un-invented. It challenges power, it challenges rent seeking, and so it should come as no surprise that it will draw criticism.

Bitcoin is nothing more than the ability to uniquely own a fraction of the numberline yet the power of this simple ideas strikes fear into the powerful.