Elon Musk and bitcoin’s chicken-and-egg problem

It seems safe to say that most folks who are holding a lot of bitcoin — say, the kind of money you might drop on an $80,000-plus Tesla Model S — are betting that bitcoin will become much more valuable in the future. That is, of course, true of a lot of assets, from urban real estate to Tesla stock. But scarcity is not, in itself, enough to create value. The execrable novel I wrote when I was 23 is very scarce — there is exactly one copy. For a scarce resource to be worth a fortune, you need your scarce thing to someday be in high demand.