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Bitcoin’s hard cap is easy to understand: there will only ever be 21 million coins.
What’s hard to understand is that the marginal market is allowed to trade far more than 21 million coins worth of exposure, because most of that exposure is synthetic and cash-settled, and it can be created or reduced in seconds.
That distinction has become Bitcoin’s core paradox in the past year or so.
Scarcity is a property of the asset, while price is a property of the market microstructure that dominates the next…
