Can you remember your adolescent days?
Those were, and still are days when young people start their path towards emancipation. The process includes a lot of "firsts" and a lot of experimenting.
One of the biggest traps young people fall into is nicotine. Somehow, somebody thought it would be a great marketing idea to promote smoking as a cool thing to do. The tobacco industry is making sure they get frequent users as soon as possible. May they burn in hell!
Anyway, I'm sure you tried to smoke and didn't like it, or you became a smoker at some point in your life. Are cigarettes rare? No. You can buy tobacco products almost anywhere.
But how many times happened that you or your smoker friends smoked almost the whole pack of cigarettes, it was the middle of the night, and shops didn't work anymore. Suddenly, the atmosphere changed in the room. You could feel the urgency in the air. That's the point when you understood the real meaning of scarcity.
But someone, in a room full of smokers, had one more cigarette in his pack. Now you can see what jealousy feels like. And then, there is someone who owns a car and can drive 4km to the nearest gas station to buy more cigarettes for the group. Instantly, he becomes the most popular and important person in the group. They even let him keep the change.
That's a banal example, but it explains well what scarce supply and raging demand feel like.
Now imagine what will happen with cryptocurrencies when they reach nearly the same scarce supply and raging demand.
Maybe 900 BTC mined daily sounds a lot and more than enough to cover the current demand, but we know the production rate is halved every 4 years while the network keeps getting larger, and therefore the demand is increasing.
A few days ago I saw someone posting on Reddit that, after a year of CPU mining, he finally mined one whole Monero. Some comments were: "WFT? A whole year just for one XMR?", and "You could've simply bought it at it's deep". At this exact moment, mining could look like an unnecessary waste of CPU power and energy. But imagine going hiking, and while walking by the river you find a lump of gold lying there. Even if it wasn't much gold, you'd probably have a cool story to tell for the rest of your life. Maybe it sounds silly now, but one day this Reddit guy will be able to tell the story of how he mined one Monero in the middle of the city just using his laptop. The value of that XMR will be the same or even more than that lump of gold. He will be able to tell a story of how he was participating in the creation of 1 XMR for the rest of his life. As I said, it sounds silly now, but one day, people will consider him just as "lucky" as the guys who heard about Bitcoin in 2012 or just as lucky as the guy who found a lump of gold lying on the floor.
Many will own a piece of BTC or XMR, but only a few will be able to own a whole coin. Even fewer people will be able to tell the story of how they mined a whole XMR.
That's why BTC and XMR won't be rare. Everybody will own some, but the supply will not be large enough to cover all the demand. It's already scarce, and there's no way of producing more than the predefined rate.
Thank you Satoshi!
