When Bitcoin reaches supply maturity, there will be no more bitcoins to mine, making those that are currently held even more valuable, making those who hold them even more inclined to keep hoarding them, no?
Not to mention, as bitcoins are inevitably lost here and there (a deleted wallet.dat here, a hoarder there, a transaction wired to a mistyped address that doesn't exist) the supply of bitcoins will actually shrink.
Wow, that's an excellent point. That doesn't happen easily with gold. People retrieve gold from ships sunk hundreds of years ago.
Actually, is there an efficient way that physical gold or other precious metals can be intentionally destroyed or put beyond use? Has anyone tried to use this technique to corner a market?
What would happen if Hugo Chávez actually got his hands on 211 tons of actual gold and announced he has verifiably shot half of it into the sun? Presumably, you could make money on such an event through the options market.
So it's a great point that it's comparatively easy to do such a thing with Bitcoin. It's even entirely possible to do it by mistake (i.e. a programming error).
Gold can be "destroyed or put beyond use" by stockpiling (similar to DeBeers & stockpiling diamonds) or by disseminating it such that recovering it is not cost-efficient. For example, the oceans have a small percentage of dissolved gold, but extracting it is too expensive to make a profit.
Actually, is there an efficient way that physical gold or other precious metals can be intentionally destroyed or put beyond use? Has anyone tried to use this technique to corner a market?
In Goldfinger, the eponymous villain tried to irradiate all the gold in Ft. Knox with a dirty bomb, making it worthless.
Oh wow, how could I miss that? Well, now it comes out that I've never seen Goldfinger. And I've listened to all the Bond discussions with John Gruber on The Talk Show. Shame on me!
Your argument is valid, however I want to point out that the third scenario you describe (mistyped addresses) is extremely unlikely due to a built-in checksum in bitcoin addresses to prevent exactly that.
That would be true if owning bitcoins had intrinsic value, but they only have value in terms of the things they can purchase, so no. Bitcoin maturity will actually cause bitcoins to decrease in value as inflation in the rest of the economy outpaces the rate of new bitcoin creation.
