Digital scarcity

By | 29th August 2017

Richard Gendal Brown wrote:

Adam Back described the idea of “digital scarcity”. That is: how to create a system that allows you to make objects in the digital world “scarce”. The obvious intuition here is to think of .mp3 files. If I email one to you, it hasn’t been transferred, it has been duplicated and is no longer scarce. We know what happened to the recorded music industry when this happened on an industrial scale. Back’s concept, thus, is the problem of how to enable transfer without duplication. Clearly, this property is key to making Bitcoin work and Back’s phrase captures it perfectly: “digital scarcity”.

Perhaps Digital Scarcity is the irreducible essence….

Is this the single concept that captures what makes Bitcoin so utterly unlike anything that came before?

https://gendal.me/2014/01/25/what-is-the-irreducible-core-of-bitcoin/

Related Entries

Share Button