August 21, 2025
If you set out to build a fund that lasts forever, as we are at EverGive, you are working against the gravity of time itself. At EverGive, our mission to create a fund that capitalises social good forever, demanded an asset as enduring as our vision. Nothing in history has survived its erosion - currencies collapse, empires fall, even great endowments dwindle. A true forever fund cannot compromise. Its foundation must rest on an asset whose scarcity is not provisional or political, but absolute. Anything less will eventually be consumed by history.
Our challenge was simple to state but brutal to solve: what asset in all of human history could credibly underpin something eternal? The search narrowed quickly to three contenders - real estate (land), gold, and Bitcoin. Real estate has always promised permanence, but it quickly failed because it is bound to geography, politics, and confiscation by the mightiest militarily at the time - e.g. who knows which invading power will own Manhattan or London real estate in 200 years time?! Thus, we knew the solution had to be decentralised, and based on a global trustless network. That quickly left us with two real contenders - gold, with its ancient reputation, and Bitcoin, with its mathematical finality. Gold was the obvious starting point, but it too failed under scrutiny.
History left us clues; let me tell you about aluminium. It presents a fascinating case study because it went from one of the world’s rarest, most precious metals to one of the most abundant commodities in all but a few decades. In the 19th century, aluminium was rarer than gold. Napoleon III had aluminium cutlery reserved for his most honoured guests while others ate with gold. Its scarcity wasn’t natural - aluminium is abundant in the earth’s crust - it was technological. No one knew how to extract it cheaply. Then came 1886. The Hall-Heroult process, powered by industrial electricity, collapsed its price overnight. What was once imperial treasure for emperors has become cheap packaging for Coca-Cola cans that we throw away. Aluminium taught us that scarcity in the physical world is always provisional. Bitcoin is the first scarcity that is terminal.
Gold has endured as a store of value longer than most assets because it resists chemical imitation. Yet even gold is not safe. Physicists have shown that it can already be created by reconfiguring the nuclei of other elements such as mercury or bismuth. The process is currently absurdly expensive and inefficient, but advances in nuclear science - fusion, compact accelerators, or quantum-controlled atomic engineering - could one day make it practical. If humanity or artificial general intelligence ever cracks commercial nuclear alchemy, then gold could be made in vats, identical to mined gold, at industrial scale. At that point, its scarcity-driven monetary value would collapse.
History warns us how quickly “impossible” scarcities can vanish. Aluminium was once rarer than gold until a breakthrough in 1886 turned it into a cheap industrial commodity. Gold will follow the same path. The deeper lesson is this: no physical commodity can credibly claim terminal supply. Every element is vulnerable to human ingenuity, and ingenuity is relentless.
That is why EverGive builds on a Bitcoin-only foundation. An eternal mission must be built on an eternal foundation. A dilution into any other asset risks undermining our mission. Bitcoin is the first and only asset whose scarcity is not geological but mathematical. Its 21 million limit is enforced by code, consensus, and energy. No central bank can decree more into existence. No laboratory can discover a shortcut. No political regime can confiscate or debase it without dismantling the entire network of global consensus.
Yes, Bitcoin’s rules are human-made - but unlike physical scarcities, they cannot be overturned by invention or decree without dismantling the global consensus itself; a feat that is nigh impossible. No system is without risk. Bitcoin faces scaling challenges, hostile regulation, and swings in public confidence. Its price today is volatile, and its future depends on adoption continuing to grow. But volatility is the cost of early discovery, not the sign of weakness. Regulation may bite at the edges, but it cannot rewrite mathematics or dissolve global consensus. Unlike every asset before it, Bitcoin’s security model is antifragile - every attempt to undermine it has only strengthened its decentralisation and hardened its network (e.g. Block Wars 2015 - 2017). A forever fund must be candid about risk, but the deeper risk - and the only certain failure - is to anchor eternity to an asset whose supply is not terminal.
This distinction is not academic - it makes a new philanthropic architecture possible. EverGive has never been possible before the historic 3rd January 2009 (Bitcoin’s Genesis Block). Traditional charity has always been trapped in a fragile loop: donations are given, spent, and soon asked for again. Endowments tried to break the cycle, but they rested on assets that governments could debase or markets could destroy. EverGive flips the model: donations go into a Bitcoin reserve, the principal is never touched, and only the growth funds causes. Because Bitcoin’s scarcity is final, for the first time in history such a reserve can credibly claim to be eternal.
Although scarcity is necessary, it is not sufficient. In a future article we will unpack a number of different criteria that must be true in a ‘forever fund’, including store of value, confiscation, decay, verification bottlenecks, and stewardship failure. Bitcoin is the only asset in history that passed them all.
We chose to build EverGive on Bitcoin alone because history left us a trail of clues; every form of physical scarcity eventually gives way. Aluminium proved that physical scarcity can vanish. At the current rate of artificial general intelligence, Gold will one day meet the same fate. Bitcoin is different. It is mathematical scarcity, and maths cannot be broken. When you are building for forever, only final scarcity will do. That is why EverGive is built on Bitcoin, and Bitcoin only.
