What kind of cost refuses to divide?

Nobody floods a system out of malice. They flood it because flooding is cheap, and it is cheap for a reason worth understanding.

Almost every cost in production behaves like an oven. You buy it once and bake with it for years, so the oven's share of each loaf shrinks toward nothing as you bake more. That is amortisation. Volume is not an aggressive strategy under those conditions. It is the only rational reading of the price.

The obvious move is to make it expensive. That does not work. A large cost still divides. Size was never the property that mattered. Divisibility was.

So the question becomes what kind of cost refuses to divide.

Whisky is one. A barrel needs years, and no two barrels can share those years. Build a warehouse ten times bigger and the building divides. What does not is each barrel occupying its space for its stretch. The structure spreads. The waiting refuses to.

The digital equivalent is work that has to hold its own materials the whole way through. Why that work holds a region, and why memory is the sensible way to hold it, is Why memory, and why a clock?

The room cannot be shared. Two of these at once means two rooms. Not one larger room. Two, each holding its own contents for its own full stretch. No arrangement lets ten of them make do with nine rooms.

What refuses to divide is not fuel burned for a race. It is space held for a stretch, once per object. Buying machines and writing software still amortise. Occupancy starts again from zero every time.

At scale the cut stays sharp. A mining warehouse is full of silicon working as hard as it can. An occupancy warehouse is full of silicon deliberately doing nothing - warm, plugged in, occupied - because holding a specific region for a specific stretch is the product. Specialisation can attack the arithmetic. It does nothing to the holding. Capacity comes from the same market at the same price, and the holding is spent once per object, again for every simultaneous copy.

This holds while keeping the region is cheaper than reconstructing it on demand. That is a reasoned expectation, not a measured floor against a well-funded party. And someone content to accumulate slowly, one a night, pays what an honest maker pays. Whether a stockpile assembled over months matters is a property of whatever is being defended, not of the construction.

The claim is not "you cannot make many." It is "how many depends on what you are prepared to spend, and that figure climbs with the count instead of flattening out."