Bitcoin = converting electricity into store of value

Money doesn't need to be backed by a tangible asset or commodity.  Bitcoin is a prime example of this concept, as it has established itself as a form of currency despite not being pegged to gold, debt, or any other physical equivalent.  Its value lies in its digital existence and the trust people have in it as a medium of exchange, even though there is nothing behind "1 BTC", just as there is nothing behind one monopoly note.


Go ahead and send me 1 million "empty digital boxes" if that's how you think.  I want you to transmit them to me using the Bitcoin protocol.  I'm curious to see how this plays out, so keep me updated on the process.


I want the Bitcoin protocol, not other protocols. 


I don't want you to send me any "empty digital box" that goes against the Bitcoin protocol. 


That's false.  If you do not meet satoshi's rules, then any transaction you make will be invalid by the nodes of the network. 

So, you want to get units of nothing that are printed by protocol X instead by protocol Y. Ok, that's your personal thing. But here we are discussing about the stupidity of wanting something like that. And the stupidity of wasting energy on transferring it. It's seems that you're constantly missing what this discussion is about.

As for the money, money has always been unit of something, either tangible or intangible. So, Bitcoin is not real money. It's like money in the game of Monopoly. But regardless of the definition it's still stupid to trade 70 thousand units of something for 1 unit of nothing. Or spend tones of energy on nothing.

Oh I see what the problem is. You're struggling to understand what a unit of work is in an economic sense and you're conflating money with currency.

Your trite 'payment in dust' analogy shows this misunderstanding. The 'dust' as a means of payment would be considered currency in that case because you are declaring it to be 'your money', but it fails as money because there is no scarcity and no value can be ascribed to it because no work is needed to be done to create it.

If I perform some work, say, building a house for you, my time and energy introduces additional value to the communal economy as that house will have value for many years to come. This would warrant the issuing of additional units of money to the community's collective money supply so that it is accounted for (if no new money is issued then the net effect of the value I have added to the economy is deflationary) If I want to pay my utility bills, buy a car, go on holiday, I need to offer the utility company, the car salesman, the travel company, sufficient proof of having done the equivalent value of work that equates to the price of the goods/services I am purchasing. So you need to give me a number of units of something which will maintain the same economic value as every single other unit of currency our communal economy uses (which denotes it as fungible money, one of the essential qualities of what makes something 'money')

Now, if you replace 'dust' with 'fiat currency' in your analogy, you could perhaps be a skilled forger and simply create units of currency in your back room and hand them to me, but in most fiat transactions the person paying has done some work for somebody else who, likewise, did work for others, and you all received various amounts of units of money which represented that. If no new value was added to the economy then the same monetary units all move around between people and there is no inflation or deflation.

Ideally, because I have created new value in the economy, our community central bank would print X number of new units of our money and that would be introduced into the economy, ensuring that additional value is accounted for and no deflation (and no inflation through excessive printing) occurs.

But, say central banks (and forgery) do introduce excessive amounts of new money into our communiity's economic system. Let's imagine they introduce a whole YEAR's worth of additional money into the system. Each unit of that money represents work that will have to be done to produce the equivalent value. Otherwise we're all going to see prices rise as there is more money in the system than there are things of value being created it equates to. Suddenly everything costs more but we still have exactly the same amount of value in the community's economy.

We have debased our money until we are able to balance the scales by producing more things of value into the system.

Each unit of money in an economic system represents a unit of time and energy spent (work), regardless of the token we adopt as its national currency (dollar, yen, pound, euro etc). It is how that money is created and the abuse of that process which results in the mess we see nations in these days.

This is what Bitcoin solves. It can only be produced through work which has been done, not work which is yet to be done.

Do you understand?

I understand perfectly that you said the same nonsense as before by using more words. Bitcoin is unit of nothing. Nothing is not scarce. Nothing has no value. Nothing cannot be money. No energy is being spend in creating nothing. In the Bitcoin system energy is spend on plain brute force random trial and error of finding a number that solves a hash combination. It has nothing to do with "creating Bitcoin". Bitcoin is created as a unit of nothing via simple declaration.

If they are "units of nothing", then it takes nothing for you to send them to me, right?  So do it. 


It is highly relevant to our discussion.  I'm trying to demonstrate that Bitcoin has value as a form of currency, even though it's not backed by a specific asset or commodity like debt or gold.  You've argued that it's essentially worthless, created out of thin air.  If that's the case, then I challenge you to send me 1 million Bitcoins.  If you're unable to do so, it would contradict your claim that Bitcoin is just like monopoly paper which can be printed out of nothing. 

You can repeat the nonsense that money is representation of work done, but reality won't change. In reality, neither work is required to create Bitcoin, nor money is representation of work done. Work is activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Money is an item, a thing used as a medium of exchange. In the Bitcoin system no such thing exists. That's why nobody here was able to answer my simple question: "the unit of what thing is BTC".  In the Bitcoin system people are just informed that they have xx units of nothing. They spend energy on random trial and error of finding a number that solves a hash combination after which the protocol tells them: "you have xx units of nothing". They then sell those units to others. That's the reality.

But you can keep denying reality by talking nonsense. It is not a problem for me to keep repeating what reality is.

I don't think you're that stupid you don't know the difference. You're just choosing to act ignorant.

He has every right to prefer a specific system or medium of exchange for the transaction. All financial transactions generally follow established protocols. There's some flexibility in choosing a method the recipient accepts as valid, but still within the parameters set by the recipient. For example, you can enter a store and choose to pay by cash or card, but you cannot take the goods and tell the cashier "I will send you units of money via carrier pigeon" and expect him to accept such a transaction. But, if you persist in using a carrier pigeon instead of the preferred method, it raises concerns. It could be that you don't have the units readily available, or maybe you're simply trying to scam.

So, why do you keep insisting on your own "system" for the transaction instead of a method the recipient is comfortable with?

Is it perhaps the conditioning children receive to believe that being wrong is a bad thing which is responsible for your inabilty to consider that your understanding of the topic is erroneous?

Let me break it down into the simplest terms I can:

The 'token' we use to represent money is currency. But we absolutely do not need to have a 'thing' at all. We could simply keep a record of debits and credits in a central database, agreed?

Money evolved out of the very first debit and credit ledgers we created and it was simply recorded as a number in a ledger. So if you as the farmer dropped off your grain at the local temple you would be assigned a certain number of credits for it and some of those credits would then be deducted against the debits you had previously run up earlier in the year when needing to buy your farming supplies etc. So you, like every other farmer and producer of goods for the community's economy would all have your debits and credits recorded in thie ledger.

If you were to look at a page of that ledger you would only see numbers being assigned to names as a result of whatever basis they had warranted a credit for. So you'd have no idea whether one unit was for grain, or grapes, or timber, as this wasn't necessary to know.

Do you know why it wasn't necessary to know? Because each unit recorded represented only one thing. The value introduced into the economic system as a result of time and energy expended creating it. Work.


That we then decided to create a token system which would then allow people to hold their own representation of that monetary unit, and then buy goods and services from other people who would accept it in exchange, is what saw the creation of a currency unit representing that monetary unit previously recorded in the ledger.

That is the difference between money and currency. Currency is just the token 'thing' we created to be able to move those written monetary unit records from the central ledger into the hands of the people so they could trade freely without it having to go through the central record for every transaction.