You can't hard fork gold, either. You don't suddenly wind up with two copies of a gold bar because someone decided to Xerox your ledger to start a new one.

The scarcity of Bitcoins is entirely a cultural delusion.

If your payment is denominated in BTC, you can't pay it with BCH even though they're a fork of the same blockchain.

BTC proper is scarce, regardless of how many times the chain is forked.

And "BCH proper" has identical scarcity characteristics to BTC and it's not as if the creation of BCH negatively impacted the price of BTC - suddenly a new "scarce" token was created and everyone who was holding BTC before the fork is $1600 USD per coin richer today. The scarcity aspect is purely a social construct.

The distinction between "BTC" and "BCH" (and "BTCS" and "BCD" and so on ad infinitum) is cultural convention. There's no inherent technical merit (or alchemical nature) to one ledger over all other contenders, it's entirely a state of mind of its users.

Yes and no. Once the blockchain forks, the distinction between all those coins is very technical. Coins from one ledger cannot be spent on another ledger.

You're right though, cultural convention decides which blockchain is the "real" Bitcoin. Most people are using BTC at the moment, but Bitmain takes payment exclusively in BCH.

This might seem like a semantic quibble, but I think it's important. There will only ever be 21 million BTC, and only ever 21 million BCH. If Bitmain decided to charge 22 million BCH for their latest ASIC miner, nobody would ever be able to pay that bill regardless of how many forks there are.

For a blockchain fork to have any value whatsoever, people need to want to own it. Bitmain ASIC sales are driving demand for BCH. Every other Bitcoin fork is doing rather poorly.

Forks aren't diluting the value of BTC, because people know that BTC is the real asset. Everything else is like fool's gold.

There is no intrinsic property that makes it "the real asset", it is a completely arbitrary distinction based on social coordination not on any fundamental property of the ledger.

That's true. But regardless of which ledger is "the real asset", there will only be 21 million of that coin.

You can clone the technology, but you can't clone societal acceptance.

Only supposing there isn't a soft fork accepted by miners upping the maximum limit of coins.

What you’re saying makes no sense and is in no way shape or form accurate.

Not refuting your point but this could also change for precious metals in the mid/far future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Scarcity

"the relative abundance of asteroidal ore gives asteroid mining the potential to provide nearly unlimited resources, which would essentially eliminate scarcity for those materials"

Apparently with the lack of a strong gravity like Earth's to sink down heavy metals, they are way more accessible in smaller bodies like asteroids (Ceres and Vesta maybe?)

I think thought-leaders just might be the cringiest buzzword being thrown around currently

Haha, good point.