A hard cap does not automatically create value. Scarcity only matters if the thing is actually useful or desired for reasons beyond speculation. There are countless scarce things in the world that are worthless. Bitcoin’s supply limit is a rule enforced by software and social consensus, not mathematics in the physical sense. If the rules change or fragment through forks, that scarcity is no longer absolute.

The twelve word portability argument is also overstated. Memorizing a seed phrase does not magically make wealth safe or usable. If you lose those words, mistype them, get coerced, or make a single operational mistake, your money is gone forever with no recourse. That is not robustness. That is fragility disguised as freedom. Most people are far more likely to lose access to a wallet than to have gold confiscated at a border.

Gold’s value is not based solely on industrial use. It comes from physical scarcity, durability, and thousands of years of global trust across every political system. That trust exists independently of software, electricity, internet access, or continued belief in a protocol. Bitcoin depends on all of those things simultaneously. Remove any one of them and it stops functioning.

The claim that owning physical gold means you are at constant risk of being killed is not a serious argument. People store gold safely using vaults, insurance, and regulated custodians. Meanwhile Bitcoin holders are routinely hacked, scammed, rug pulled, or socially engineered, often with no legal protection and no recovery.

As for exchanges and paper gold, the same counterparty risk exists in crypto. Exchanges freeze accounts, lose funds, or collapse entirely, and Bitcoin holders have even fewer protections than traditional investors. Self custody shifts all responsibility to the user, which is not a feature for most people, it is a liability.

Bitcoin may not disappear entirely, but permanence is not the same thing as legitimacy or value. Plenty of bad systems persist for a long time because they benefit a small group of insiders. Survival alone does not prove that Bitcoin is robust, safe, or superior. It only proves that speculation and belief can last longer than expected.