Bitcoin is infinitely divisible. therefore, it is not scarce.
There are 100,000,000 units in a bitcoin called satoshis. This makes btc anything but scarce.
Since bitcoin is digital, you can sub-divide it even further than one sat. If anyone who wants bitcoin is able to get some, then it can’t be scarce.
Divisibility Does Not Equal Inflation
It’s all just fractions and maths. Yes, bitcoin could technically be broken into smaller and smaller pieces for an infinite amount of “sub satoshis”. But the same thing could be said for most things.
Technically, I can half 1 inch of thread into smaller and smaller measurements and never reach zero. I can have 0.0001 inches of thread or 0.0000000000000000012 inches. There are an infinite amount of measurements in between 0 and 1 inches, but that doesn’t make 1 inch of thread any longer.
Supply Cap
The idea is that Bitcoin has a fully diluted supply of about 21 Million coins. Right now, each coin is made up of 100,000,000 satoshis.
1 sat = 0.00000001 btc
Using a smaller denominator to represent the units in bitcoin does not affect the holder of the asset. If someone owns 2.1 billion sats (21 btc), they own 0.000001% of the total supply of bitcoin. If the entire network starts denominating things in millisats, they now own 2.1 trillion msats. It’s still 2.1 billion sats, it’s still 21 btc, it’s still 0.000001% of the total supply.
In fact, things are already measured in msats on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. And that has not increased the supply or affected the price significantly.
This is not the case with fiat like the US dollar. They have an infinite amount of money to inject into the system that constantly devalues the purchasing power for holders of USD. It is by design that fiat currencies are continuously devalued.
Accessibility
Some FUDsters of bitcoin’s divisibility seem to define scarcity as limited accessibility to the asset.
“If absolutely everyone can have access to bitcoin, how could it be scarce?”
Bitcoin is revolutionary for exactly this reason. If any person on the planet wants to hold bitcoin they can, no matter the price. Bitcoin is apolitical, border-less, and censorship resistant. They can buy as little as one satoshi which is worth a fraction of a penny at the time of this writing. And in the future, it could be possible to buy less than 1 sat on-chain, but this does not change the total supply.
No matter when you get into bitcoin, it will never be diluted and you will retain your percentage of the total supply, be it in bitcoin, bits, sats, msats, usats, or gigasats.
The Pizza Problem
Let’s say I cut a pizza into two pieces and give you one of them.
You now have ½ or 50% of that pizza.
If I keep the other ½ and cut it again, I now own two pieces of pizza.
I didn’t make more pizza, I made two ¼ pieces. You and I each still have 50% of the pizza.
Theoretically, I can cut my pizza into billions of little atomic pieces, but I can never make you have less pizza.
The difference with bitcoin is that the atomic pieces (satoshis) are still usable for transferring value, even on this microscopic scale.