79b79aa8 said: no, mr. back, forking bitcoin 100 times, or launching 1000 alts, does not alter digital scarcity, for the simple reason that the vast majority of forks and alts will never hold any significant market value. Click to expand...

The ETF news is a great help but still not ideal in two senses.1) They imply a hardfork split is negative. This may be immaterial but it shows an error in the applicant's understanding.2) They're going to have to say what they do with the minority chain coins. This is analogous to Coinbase's mistake in the ETH/ETC split, where as I recall they refused to credit users for the ETC. The result is that the operator can pocket the minority coins. This policy must be made clear in advance, and if it is made clear I doubt many people will support a Coinbase-style policy as it potentially makes the ETF shares worth up to 50% less than actual BTC (in case of a "51/49" split).Result? Eventually they will have to adopt this [edit: all substantial forks credited] policy. The only reason I can see for not adopting it is an error in understanding.True regarding altcoins, but regarding hardforks it is crucial to realize that *even if* 100 forks were to all hold significant value, it would not alter digital scarcity at all. This is a basic fact of ledger economics.For example, the ETH/ETC split didn't alter digital scarcity. Trivially there are twice as many "ethers" as before, but an "ether," like a "bitcoin," is just a shorthand term for the more unwieldy "0.00~X% of the total ledger." That is, a bitcoin is just a shorthand for a certain percentage of the total Bitcoin pie, a 21 millionth of the eventual total (or 1/16,152,300 of the current total ledger as of now). The percentage is unaltered by forks, despite accounting appearances.This ultimately much more elucidating and completely correct "percentage of the total ledger" expression being unwieldy to write down allows people to fall into the error of thinking that forks/spinoffs actually dilute holder stake in any way. They absolutely do not, in the same mathematically undeniable way that 2+2 is absolutely not 5.See the beginning section of my article:Adam's statement is thus equivalent to saying something like 2+2=5. Demonstrably, provably wrong. It will be uncontroversially understood as a fallacy by all who take a serious look at an elucidation like I gave above.One could of course fall back on the position that hardfork splits create confusion that could shrink the total pie of which hodlers hold a constant percentage, but that issue is separate from the naive "split means more coin units, therefore breaks digital scarcity" fallacy. This one must be broadly recognized as a pure falllacy as soon as possible.