While scarcity is one of the factors influencing price, remember this doesn't make BTC worth a lot of money without any other determining factors as well. Halvings alone don't make it rise either.

Like, if we had zero shops to accept BTC and no exchanges for it today, it would have been worth probably still almost nothing as of now even with all those halvings. Gold has its use cases, it's still being largely used today in so many industries. If Bitcoin keeps going the "authority-friendly" way, it might step in a large trap and fail to become what it was supposed to.