Are members invested in Bitcoin/crypto?

a different kind of hardness.​

bitcoin’s claim is not philosophical. it is mechanical.

unlike gold, bitcoin does not respond to price. it does not expand when demand rises, and it does not contract when demand falls. its supply is governed entirely by time, according to a schedule fixed at inception and enforced by the network itself. that schedule does not care about recessions, wars, elections, panics, or the bitcoin price.

bitcoin was capped at birth. twenty-one million units. not an estimate. not a reserve calculation. not a probabilistic assessment signed off by a committee. a hard ceiling, defined in code and indifferent to circumstance. roughly ninety-four percent of that supply has already been issued. the remainder will be released slowly, on a predetermined path, with issuance effectively exhausted by around 2040. after that, the supply does not grow.

this is what makes bitcoin unusual. gold’s scarcity is governed by geology and incentives. bitcoin’s scarcity is governed by rules and time. when the gold price rises, supply eventually responds. when the bitcoin price rises, supply does not. instead, issuance tightens mechanically through the halving process, which reduces the flow of new coins roughly every four years regardless of demand.

this is not a moral hierarchy. it is a structural asymmetry.

gold is scarce because it is hard to extract. bitcoin is scarce because it is hard to change. gold’s constraint is physical. bitcoin’s constraint is social and procedural. one obeys physics. the other obeys consensus. both are forms of hardness, but they behave differently under stress.

by the end of this century the total stock of bitcoin will be unchanged. there will be no technological breakthrough that unlocks new bitcoin deposits. no reclassification of marginal code into viable supply. no price signal that induces expansion. scarcity is enforced by design, not discovered over time.

this is why bitcoin is often described as algorithmically scarce. not because it is digital, but because its supply dynamics are explicitly non-responsive. it is a system constructed to refuse incentives. where gold yields, bitcoin remains inert.
that inertness is the feature. it is also the source of discomfort.

markets are comfortable with scarcity that leaks slowly and impersonally. they are less comfortable with scarcity that depends on rule adherence and human coordination. geological systems do not argue back. social systems do. and the harder the rule, the more attention is paid to whether it can be broken.

bitcoin’s hardness, therefore, is not just a question of numbers. it is a question of credibility. not whether the rules are strict, but whether they can remain strict under pressure. not whether scarcity is defined, but whether it can survive stress without being renegotiated.