- fundamental economic condition: limited resources confronting unlimited wants
- drives all allocation decisions, trade-offs, and opportunity costs
- natural scarcity: finite physical resources (land, minerals, energy)
- artificial scarcity: deliberately restricted supply (patents, licensing, token caps)
- digital scarcity: cryptographic enforcement of finite supply, pioneered by Bitcoin
- bandwidth as scarce resource in cyber: computational capacity for cyberlink creation is bounded by staking weight
- scarcity creates price signals that coordinate decentralized decision-making across the economy
- abundance economics explores post-scarcity conditions where marginal cost approaches zero (information goods, AI-generated content)