Never underestimate how much the critics do not know about Bitcoin

I've been discussing bitcoin with a smart friend who is a macro analyst at a big bank on and off since 2017. He's always been a skeptic, and still really hasn't conceded much about bitcoin's value.

Just yesterday we were discussing bitcoin again, and he assured me he understood the importance of hashrate in bitcoin mining. We were comparing bitcoin mining to gold mining. I mentioned that the gold supply increases by 2-3% per year but if the gold price went up enough, that number could actually increase because more resources would be allocated to gold mining and they would dig more gold out of the ground, whereas that would not be true for bitcoin. He insisted bitcoin mining was no different, and that more miners will turn on as the price increases, so more bitcoin would be mined.

This is of course wrong, there is a fixed supply of bitcoin released every block that miners compete for, so the number of bitcoin miners running does not impact the new supply of bitcoin.

Right now the marketcap of bitcoin is 1.337 Trillion dollars. The difference in marketcap between the bitcoin he was imagining and the bitcoin we have is exactly 1.337 Trillion dollars. Such a system would have collapsed long ago.