Captain Bitcoin Token Economics — Part Two: Scarcity
In the previous article, we laid out the mechanics of the token and how it links to the Bitcoin draw.
In this article, we will talk about how the economics of captain bitcoin has been designed to be fundamentally linked to the adoption of the Captain bitcoin network using data from the first few weeks of the platform.
Scarcity
Digital scarcity is a key principle in token economics and it is something that only digital assets can do with real certainty.
Commodities like gold, for example, are known to be scarce, but their true supply is relatively unknown.
It’s quite possible for example that a new gold seam is discovered that radically increases the global supply. Or, maybe Elon Musk will go and mine some out of an asteroid. We can never be truly sure that more gold doesn’t turn up in the future.
Nevertheless, gold is one of the most established “Store of Value” assets on the planet, with a massive $9 Trillion of value stored in gold.
The reason why people store their money in gold is because it is scarce. That means not only will your money be safe in it (because it can’t be inflated away), but if more people want it over time, the price per ounce will go up due to supply (smaller over time) and demand (higher over time).
Bitcoin works on a similar principle, except, unlike gold, we know with absolute certainty that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. Like many others in the crypto space, we think Bitcoin is a superior Store of Value asset to gold and we think all the satoshis we’re giving away on our platform every day, will be worth far more in the future.
The Digital Gold Rush
Much like Bitcoin, there was a point when gold was pretty easy to find.
In 1842, the first gold in California was found by a guy called Francisco Lopez, while he was pulling onions out of the ground. Nugget sized chunks of gold were just lying around on the floor. He picked some up and took it to get valued, and sure enough it was thousands of dollars worth of gold.
Word started getting around. Soon, people began turning up with pans, filtering gold out of the river beds where it was just mostly just sitting there in the silt. A little bit harder to get, but you could still earn far more looking for gold with a simple old tin pan than you could doing pretty much any other work.
By 1848 the gold rush had begun. People flocked to California in the hopes of striking it rich. By 1849, over three hundred thousand people had set up camp and by 1850 all the surface gold was gone. If you wanted to find gold after that, you needed engineering; deep dredging, serious excavation, and hydraulic mining equipment.
Exactly the same thing has happened with Bitcoin. In the first year of the network, Satoshi solo mined nearly a million bitcoins, with what was likely a laptop or similar low powered device. At the time Satoshi was mining, the difficulty on bitcoin was 1, now it is 15,784,217,546,288,
Meaning that bitcoins are over 15 trillion times harder to find than in 2009.
The value of digital assets is proportional to how many people want them and how hard they are to find.
Designed Scarcity
On the Captain Bitcoin network, we wanted to link the scarcity of the CAPT token directly to the number of users on the platform.
Much like bitcoin, finding CAPT tokens is easier for those early in the network, because like the early gold rush, there are fewer people around looking for it.
Every day, 21 million CAPT tokens are created and distributed to those who have been watching videos and referring users to the platform (our version of mining) and our unique mechanism ensures that everyone looking for CAPT gets some.
Take a look at some data from our first few weeks of our beta launch.
CAPT becoming scarce the more users adopt the platform
As you can see the number of users coming to the platform exploded at around day 15 or 16 in our first adoption wave.
Throughout this period you can see that the average number of tokens that each user earned in that time dropped significantly.
Let’s take a deeper look before and after this first adoption wave on Captain Bitcoin and see how participation on the platform yielded different rewards.
In just 10 days CAPT tokens got about 10X more scarce than they were on Day 10. This will continue to happen with each subsequent adoption wave, and we have not left our Beta phase yet!
It’s Still Early
Although we’ve picked up some great numbers in the phase of our Beta phase, with over ten thousand users signing up and earning tokens in just four weeks. We haven’t really got started yet!
Those who join the network in the early days will be the CAPT whales of the future, just like in Bitcoin. Only here, you don’t have to put significant capital at risk, just your time.
The CAPT gold rush is only just beginning.
