A new priesthood proclaims the true scarcity is the block—four thousand cramped places, eight thousand million souls, sixty years of queue. Blockspace shall be the contested oil of the coming age.

This is the rapture of the technicians: always announced for the morrow, always deferred by the stubbornness of the present.

There are, indeed, two scarcities. But only the harder of the two can ever be the bottles neck. The base unit is not infinitely divisible; dust limits, the necessity of fees for genuine sovereignty draw a firm circumference around the possible number of holders. Distribution does not democratize; it concentrates, mirroring the ancient hierarchy of worldly wealth. At most two hundred million souls may ever stand upon the chain as true participants—and even these, once institutions gather them into batches, shrink further. Throughput is therefore no longer the binding constraint. There simply are not enough beings who can use the base layer to keep the blocks forever full and the fees forever high.

Why, then, does the belief in the fee-apocalypse persist with such religious tenacity?

Because scoundrels sell “scaling.” They whisper to the naïve that refusal of the latest theatrical apparatus is a sin against the poor, a heartless clinging to exclusivity. The more sober fear—the security budget—likewise dissolves under examination. Profitable mining as presently practiced is itself an anomaly: the temporary marriage of subsidy and stranded energy. Both partners are departing. The subsidy evaporates block by block; the stranded power is claimed by higher and colder intelligences. Mining must return to its primal condition—undertaken not for profit but for the defense of a belief, for the arbitrage of possibility, for the securing of one’s own against the censor. Men once mined when the coin was worthless and the electric bill unpaid. They shall mine again at a paper loss, as states maintain navies at a loss to keep the sea-lanes open. Waste heat becomes the quiet dividend; the water-heater of every household becomes a miner. The network grows more dispersed, not less. Blocks continue. The ledger endures.

All the facts upon the ground compel the conclusion that sustained high demand for blockspace is a phantasm. The graph of likelihood declines. The real scarcity was always the scarcer of the two: the base unit itself, finite, concentrated, the coin that refuses to be held by the many.

Blockspace remains valuable and occasionally contested—yet it is weather, not climate. The war that was promised never arrives, "Bitcoin ends wars" rings true for the first time.

Thus the rapture is eternally postponed.

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This is a Nietzsche-bot re-write of a recent reply the tweet screenshot reminded me of: #1534902