Why is scarcity a value add? The difficulty and costs associated with getting money into and out of the ecosystem have to offset the scarcity value add. I'm still not convinced that scarcity is valuable. It surely benefits the people who were early adopters but what is the value to new investors? Not to mention how incredibly inefficient all of this is.

Scarcity simply means that someone can't print more units of the store of value, or dig it out of the ground. When someone other than you is doing something like that, your share of wealth is being whittled away. With scarcity, you can maintain your purchasing power indefinitely. You don't have to jump through hoops to find the best rates, or find the best return, etc. Your wealth is simply preserved

Why is the underlying asset valuable? If I create a crypto that only has ten tokens is it more valuable than BTC? It's scarcer than BTC...