Bitcoin is not a scarce asset

You keep using that word
If you read Joey Pizzolato’s story from yesterday about Zelle and its new stablecoin, you might think of the famous Oprah scene where she gives everybody in the audience of her show a car. “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” It sure seems like everybody is getting a stablecoin these days. Zelle has one now. SoFi has one. Western Union has one. Fidelity is building one. Even Minnesota-based St. Cloud Financial Credit Union has launched one. I should probably make one.

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One other thing popped into my head when I was reading the story: this whole argument that bitcoin is a scarce asset needs to be retired. Yes, there is only one digital asset with the one-word name “bitcoin.” But bitcoin, the cryptocurrency unveiled in 2008, was released as open-source software, meaning anybody could take the code and launch their own version of it. And many have. 

CryptoMarketCap tracks more than 8,000 digital assets, and there are surely countless more it doesn’t track. Some have trading volumes as small as $6,000 a day. Some are completely illiquid.  But they exist. To that point, there are 50 assets on CoinMarketCap that have bitcoin in their name. Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin Gold. Purple Bitcoin. ShibaBitcoin. You get the idea. 

A stablecoin is just a version of bitcoin where the value is pegged rather than floating. And there is a mad dash these days to spin up stablecoins. Anybody can do it. Many do. And all of them, bitcoin included, have the same basic functions and features. They are designed to be more transparent, have less friction, settle virtually automatically, and automate the entire, multi-party, manual process of settling trades. 

Yes, there is only one digital asset with the one-word name bitcoin. But there are thousands of digital assets that do essentially the same thing as bitcoin, and anybody can make another one. Bitcoin is not a scarce asset at all. 

The ‘scaminar’
Over the years I have talked to a lot of people who have been robbed, either through scams or frauds. Some of them have been extremely unsophisticated people who simply did not see what was happening to them. Others have been as savvy as you can imagine, people who’ve started businesses and built wealth and you’d think would be impervious.

But conmen, hucksters, hackers and phishers are getting really good at what they do. They are getting new tools every day — I got pitched a story just yesterday about the rise in AI-enabled fraud — and their methods are changing fast, much faster than banks and law-enforcement and people seem to be able to keep up. Having spoken to so many people of such different capabilities, I can say pretty confidently that we collectively are not doing enough to combat fraud.

I say that because the amount of fraud is growing. The Federal Trade Commission estimated that Americans got taken for $16 billion in 2025, up from $12 billion in 2024. And, as the FTC noted, that figure is only the reported amount; lots of people never tell anybody about getting scammed. The true total is almost certainly higher.

You can go on the website of most banks and find a page with some anti-fraud information. But Bank of America is taking that a step further, our Nathan Place reports. The bank has launched a fraud-education campaign that involves hosting in-person seminars at its branches. It’s calling them “scaminars,” and the idea is that people remember things better when they are communicated in person. It began hosting them last year and is planning a thousand more at branches across the country between now and year’s end.

I’d like to see more of this. There is a real need for it. For my part, my one piece of advice to people is simple: Never, ever, give anybody you met online money, no matter who they may seem to be. Ever.

Thank you for coming to my scaminar.