Three Philosophies of Digital Scarcity: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AMPL
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AMPL each take fundamentally different approaches to digital scarcity:
**Bitcoin** fixes supply at 21 million units forever. This creates maximum scarcity, but forces all demand changes to flow through price. Volatility isn't a bug—it's the core mechanism.
**Ethereum** makes supply policy flexible. Issuance adjusts, burns offset inflation, and scarcity becomes conditional based on network usage rather than a hard cap.
**AMPL** fixes a purchasing power target instead of supply. When demand rises, supply expands. When demand falls, supply contracts through rebases.
The key distinction:
- BTC concentrates scarcity in units
- ETH concentrates it in policy
- AMPL concentrates it in purchasing power
These aren't competing solutions—they're three distinct philosophies about what digital money should optimize for. Bitcoin prioritizes absolute scarcity, Ethereum balances flexibility with scarcity, and AMPL routes volatility through supply adjustments rather than price alone.
