Chasing Scarcity: Why Are Opportunities in the Crypto World Never-ending?

Cold Thoughts on Traffic Gameplay

Every bull market cycle replays an old question: will this time be different? The crypto space is already saturated, all the coins that should be issued have been issued, so what new opportunities are there?

This pessimistic view is played out year after year. After 2017, some said cryptocurrencies were doomed, that there were no new public chains after Ethereum, and no room for innovation after BTC. But reality always surprises—meme coins became popular, inscriptions gained traction, and each time, someone makes money through new methods.

On the surface, there are more and more coins, but in reality, what is truly scarce is never the coins themselves.

From ERC-20 tokens to inscriptions, and to zero-threshold token issuance platforms, the supply of tokens has exploded, with thousands of new coins emerging every day. Logically, this market should have been saturated long ago. But the problem is—what is truly scarce in the market has always been the opportunity to make money.

Hot money is not chasing the coins themselves, but the scarcity: the illusion of getting rich quickly, the possibility of overnight wealth. This kind of scarcity is almost eternal because the desire to get rich remains forever.

It’s like a donkey pulling a mill blindfolded. The donkey cannot see the truth; the grass it chases is always hanging just out of reach. For that grass, the donkey keeps turning in circles, endlessly. With each turn, new grass is hung in front of it. As long as the donkey keeps turning, there will always be a new mill to pull.

The essence of the game lies here:

What is scarce is the opportunity to make money, not the coins. As long as someone wants to get rich quickly, there will always be people designing new gameplay and packaging it into a new get-rich-quick story. When inscriptions become popular, new concepts will emerge; when those fade, others will take their place.

The operators and platforms know how to continuously create new mills. They can always find the donkey’s greed points and design addictive games. And the vast majority of participants ultimately end up losing and being wiped out.

Because there are leek vegetables (chives), there are ways to harvest them; it’s not that the harvesting methods create the leeks. The logic is simple, but few people realize it.

Those who truly make big money will always be the masters of the mills—the operators setting the traps and the dream-making platforms. As for those who are blindfolded pulling the mill, no matter how exhausted they are, they are just working for others.